For example, they don't expose essential network configuration options. Nevertheless, it's a start. It comprises a number of extensions to DCE RPCs. Chief among them is an extension that adds a primitive data type to support object references. Unfortunately, Microsoft's strong foundation is undermined by the DCOM reference counting design that requires active objects to be regularly pinged over the network.
Reference counting manages the life cycle of instantiated components.
With it, an object increments a counter whenever an instance is created and decrements the counter whenever an instance is destroyed. DCOM has no way of knowing when a client object has abruptly terminated, therefore, it must verify that the object reference held by the client is still active by pinging it. It's easy to picture how a large number of active objects could easily swamp the network with traffic. The DCOM specification also provides for some sophisticated reference counting and pinging optimizations, such as updating multiple interface reference counts with a single call and creating sets of objects that can be pinged simultaneously. But until either of these technologies can demonstrate a standard method of communicating over an async hronous transport, operation will be limited to LANs and server backbones.