Microsoft & Web Services (SOAP)

Description:About seven years ago, Microsoft started adding support for COM (Component Object Model) in all their products. The developer tools from Microsoft facilitated easy creation and consumption of COM objects; various APIs were upgraded from standard Windows calls to COM object methods; the Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, etc.) and Internet Explorer browser were made automation enabled; to that end that even SQL Server supported COM (remember sp_OACreate and SQL DMO?).