Inheriting legacy COM architecture, is it any good?

Question

Our system looks like this:

One or many applications containing one or many in-process COM component(s), that communicate with some hardware via a single COM server. (Hope that makes sense - please ask if it needs clarification)

The design decisions that led to this system design have been lost in the mists of time, however I think that:

• The single COM server provides serialised access to the hardware.
• The OCX makes customer app development easier.

My questions are:

1. If we were to do this again, would we do things the same way?
2. What's the .NET analogy?

Thanks for any comments or pointers --R

Answer 1

You have a resource managed/controlled by a single service (the h/w and com service). You have client talking to the service (the OCXs). Seems pretty simple client server and I suppose ok - if it does what it needs to do.

In terms of re-architecting what would be your goals? The existing architecture may not service future goals (for example you may want more resilience in client server call) so may need to be changed - but without further info I'd say it was ok.