I have posted the first public draft of my thesis, primarily to get feedback I can use to weed out the most egregious errors before I am (tentatively) set to defend it in March. I plan on soliciting reviews from some of the communities that have formed around the technologies I discuss — namely, Visual Basic, COM, Delphi, CORBA, Java and OSGi as well as .NET.

The final revision will be made available under a Creative Commons license, enabling people to share the thesis freely (as long as no modifications are made, and it’s done on a non-commercial basis). There is a lot of confusion surrounding this field, and I’m hoping that my thesis will help straighten things out. Also, I hope to strip component technology of its veneer of complexity, by demonstrating the straight-forward technology that powers object invocations and by discussing the implementation of component models.

I’m appreciative of all feedback — please send  comments through e-mail. Thanks!