Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Accessing COM Objects from Visual Basic .NET

By far, one of the most common and important forms of COM interop is the consumption of COM objects from inside of managed applications. Runtime Callable Wrappers enable such consumption. The following sections describe how to create and consume Runtime Callable Wrappers from your managed applications.

Creating a Runtime Callable Wrapper Automatically

In order to access COM objects from managed code, you need to have a Runtime Callable Wrapper. You can obtain RCWs for COM objects in two ways. The first is to create them yourself, and the second is to use the vendor's PIAs (Primary Interoperability Assemblies). In this section, you will see how you can create RCWs for virtually any COM object, leaving ...