You still definitely need to know COM to write Windows apps. I had to learn a lot of COM in the last five years. Granted, the Windows desktop isn't exactly a gr

You still definitely need to know COM to write Windows apps. I had to learn a lot of COM in the last five years. Granted, the Windows desktop isn't exactly a growth market nowadays. (Note that all the apps I've worked on are cross-platform and aren't Windows-specific, so COM use is limited to implementations of the platform abstraction layer.)