I have gotten sufficiently comfortable with the C#/.NET world that I had almost managed to forget what an absolute horror old-fashioned COM programming is. I had even gotten to the point where my feelings towards Microsoft were starting to warm. Now I'm remembering how much there is to forgive them for.
I mean, this isn't rocket science. I have a plugin to Internet Explorer. I want Javascript to make a call into that, have the plugin do some stuff, and asynchronously call a callback method to handle the results. In any reasonably modern environment, that's maybe a couple of hours' work. But instead, I've spent practically the entire flipping week wrestling with it. Pointers that look real, but aren't because they're from the wrong apartment. Constructors that work from one thread, but not from another. Interfaces that are all so weakly typed that it's trivial to make value assignments when you mean to make reference assignments. Et cetera.
I begin to think it's time to remove C++ from my resume -- not because I don't know it, but because programming in it is sufficiently unfun to not be worth the stress...
