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What more does COM/DCOM do for me than RPC?

I'm new to COM/DCOM. I'm trying to transfer event data from clients to a single server. These events may contain data such as (<64-bit-datetime>, "SERVICE_STARTED", "PARAMS"), so they're individually pretty small and they get queued on the client, and then transferred in batches every 1-48 hours (depending on preferences).

Can anyone explain what (if any) benefits I'd get by using COM/DCOM to transfer the data to the server rather than RPC or raw sockets? I've done sockets before but not RPC or COM, so I'm looking for pointers in the right direction to save me some research time. I understand that RPC allows procedure calls rather than just raw sockets data transfer, but that doesn't help me understand the RPC/COM differentation. Thanks for any info.
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Thanks for all of the comments. Looks like everyone has a little different opinion. :) From what I can tell, MS is saying to use the .NET framework's communication mechanisms rather than COM for new development. I wasn't sure what the MS site meant until I started reading about SOAP, which I suspect is MS' new solution from cross-machine communication. It's not clearly called out though. Perhaps they just mean .NET and all of the Socket, SOAP, etc options available in general.

"COM and .NET can achieve similar results. The .NET Framework provides developers with a significant number of benefits including a more robust, evidence-based security model, automatic memory management and native Web services support. For new development, Microsoft recommends .NET as a preferred technology because of its powerful managed runtime environment and services." http://www.microsoft.com/com/default.mspx

I'll probably be writing my server in managed code / C#, but my clients in C++ to reduce client dependencies. SOAP looks interesting, I'll have to do more research on it.