creating COM's ?

[Gman]

trying to find a tutorial on creating COM dll's for windows using visual studio but all I seem to find so articles explain what the COM's are.

Anyone got any good sources that'll walk me through creating them ?

 

[pinkaardvark]

COM is just another term for ActiveX. A COM Dll is just a dll created in a language like VB6 etc and can be registered in the registry with a COM interface unlike the old fashioned windows dll's of yesteryear.

 

[Gman]

Yep know most of that just trying to work out if its possible to create the dll's within visual studio as at work I just use VB6.

Update: just dog a little more this morning and by the looks of things i've even got to use vb6 or get a copy of vb 2005 to create the com's ahh well thought that visual studio 2005 might have got it built in .

 

[pinkaardvark]

VB6 is visual studio? or do you mean visual studio .net?

You can create COM components with either but you'd be better with VB6 if you want to create true COM dll's

 

[Gman]

at the moment i've got Visual Studio 2005 at home but can't find any options to create create the coms unless there described as something else in the project list.

VB6 at work was installed along side Visual studio 6 I believe but the one at home is .net .

 

[Mr^B]

Do you mean a COM or do you mean a .Net assembly?

Either way, you can create them with Visual Studio 2005 - you just need to wrap .Net assemblies up to make them accessible from VB6/VBA/etc:

COM callable wrappers:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f07c8z1c.aspx

 

[pinkaardvark]

In VB6 a DLL project is a COM Dll, so you don't have to do anything special other than create a dll.

In .NET managed code runs in the .NET runtime like Java does so to create a COM component you need to wrap a managed dll with a COM wrapper as mentioned above, hence the VB6 route is arguably the easiest for you.

 

[Gman]

ahh that's it thanks guys didn't know about the wrapper. Will have a go at them but probably just get vb6 installed.