Over the last decade object-oriented development methods and techniques have gained rapid acceptance in many areas, such as graphical user interfaces and network programming. Currently there are two major standard architectures available to support distributed object-oriented programming: the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture and Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model. While both standards address the same problems, i.e., language, hardware and operating system independence, they provide different features for application developers. This paper provides an overview of both architectures and a comparison of program development under each. Conclusions are drawn about the suitability of each architecture for different programming requirements based on our experience developing systems.