Welcome to the COM Manifest Studio
What is side-by-side execution?
Side-by-side COM allows your application to use ActiveX components (*.ocx and *.dll files) without having to register them. The original vision of this was to allow "copy deployment" of the application, but has many benefits. You can have a private copy of the DLL or OCX without worrying that another application will install an older or newer copy that breaks your application. It also allows you to successfully install and run on non-Administrator accounts.
What is the COM Manifest Studio?
The COM Manifest Studio uses fragment files that is combined together to a .manifest file for a particular application (.exe program).