A common pattern for COM projects, in my experience, was a VB front end talking to a C++ back end. This was usually a pretty brutal experience TBH, even with AT

A common pattern for COM projects, in my experience, was a VB front end talking to a C++ back end. This was usually a pretty brutal experience TBH, even with ATL, because there were many fiddly details that intruded, specifically: - reference counting - string incompatibilities, exacerbated by the tendency of every man and his dog at Microsoft with an internet audience writing their own COM string class for C++ and publishing it; IIRC BSTR, _bstr_t, CCOMBStr but there were surely others, none of which really succeeded in bridging the very large gap that exists between what COM things a string should look like (length encoded at the front, two bytes per char) and the C / C++ view.