What is a COM object, how is it developed, what are the features of the Microsoft COM implementation?

Question

Component Object Model

Good afternoon everyone. I would like to get short and understandable for a beginner answers to the following questions:
1) What is a COM object?
2) How is the development of a COM object?
3) What are the features of Microsoft's COM implementation?
Please refrain from throwing off multi-page literature.
Thank you.

Answer 1

1) Another crazy incarnation of Microsoft's attempt to embed one program into another. Before that there were DDE, OLE, ActiveX and other zoo. There are even legends about it .

First there were Windows API and DLL Hell. The N1 revolution was DDE - remember how links allowed us to create status bars reflecting the current price of Microsoft stock? Around the same time, Microsoft created the VERSION INFO resource, which excludes DLL Hell. But another group at Microsoft found a fatal flaw in DDE - they didn't write it!

2) Long, painful and with a lot of digging in the debugger. The COM specification is a huge multi-page document that you are afraid of.
3) They were popular in 1998 and around that time. Then even the desktop of the window was made such an object. For 10 years, popularity has declined, since it turned out that apart from embedding Excel in Word, nobody needs all this (especially in THIS form), and programs can communicate with each other not using a monstrous binary interface with marshaling, and not even with miles of XML to SOAP, but much more lightweight sending and calling to the REST API. Now this miracle can only be found when working with DirectX.

Answer 2

This is a way of interface interaction developed (I would say licked from corba). Activex could not be before because it is a development com. The previous commenter seems to have mistyped.
1) com object is the entity of the class that implements IUnknown.
2) well, using a computer. Too abstract question. Usually you describe the interface and its implementation, well, then you pull this interface. Everything is quite simple.
3) oh already this youth. Implementation features are usually described in multi-page literature.