This guide first looks at the new tools that allow CORBA and COM to work together. (Both authors contributed to the OMG COM/CORBA Internetworking Standard, so they are highly familiar with the tools.) The book offers good coverage of CORBA basics, including basic philosophy and the nuts and bolts of its Interface Definition Language (IDL) and data types. The authors detail how to map data types back and forth between CORBA and COM. Short, effective programming samples illustrate the basics of calling CORBA methods from within Visual Basic. Advanced chapters look at such topics as exception handling and using COM/CORBA on the Internet.