I read the following from another thread, LOL....and think it might be interesting to see a poll out of it.
Quote from TGregg:
Howdy Hideo,
Welcome to Elite Trader. You'll find a wide range of people here, from extremely capable traders to loud mouth newbies, to cranky bastids who have lost it all.
Now for a slight technology lesson that I'll probably get all wrong (fortunately, many at this BBS will be quick to correct me). Once upon a time, Microsoft noticed that there was this thing called Networks that was catching on (this was in about 1993, and networked PCs had been around since what? 88?). Anyways, they produced Windows Fer Workgroups, which included networking, and they realized that different computers and different programs needed to talk to eachother.
So they called their first attempts DDE and Net DDE for Dynamic Data Exchange. It hardly worked for crap. So then they came up with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). About this time, I had a project to integrate Excel and Word, and had to use DDE one way, and OLE the other (couldn't get OLE to work both ways).
Anyways, MS found out about the problems with OLE, so they invented .Net, the current standard (unless there has been an announcement this weekend).
My point is that DDE is ancient, old and decrepit. You'd do well to avoid such things.
EDIT Crap, I forget about Com. Between OLE and .Net was com. Com actually worked pretty dang well.