54 Commandments of COM Object Model Design.

Craig shares a list of 54 COM object model design commandments:

I thought I would share the list of rules that we follow when developing the Visual Studio COM object model. There are a few blemishes in our object model, mostly caused by legacy code in our code base, where we do not follow these rules, but we try to follow them as close as possible. These rules may be applicable to your COM object model (with some changes, such as your root object probably will not be called DTE), and some are applicable to .NET development (translate HRESULTs to exceptions). I encourage you to make a list of rules such as this when you design an object model, it makes defining the objects much easier and consistent.

This provides some fascinating insight into the design of the Visual Studio COM object model. Check it out.