Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4

Chapter 28. COM-Interop

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Review of COM

• Calling COM from .NET

• Interop with ActiveX controls

• Configuring .NET assemblies to be called from COM

• Introduction to P/Invoke

A vast body of technology surrounds Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM). Over the years, this model has been the cornerstone of so much Microsoft-related development that we have to take a long, hard look at how to integrate all that technology into the world of .NET.

This chapter begins by taking a brief backward glance at COM, and then compares it with the way that components interact in .NET. It also takes a look at the tools Microsoft provides to help link the two together. Having looked at the theory, you then try it out by building a few example applications. First you take a legacy basic COM object and run it from a Visual Basic 2010 program. Then you repeat the trick with a full-blown ActiveX control. Next, you run some Visual Basic code in the guise of a COM object. Finally, this chapter takes a look at some tools associated with going below the COM layer and into the P/Invoke layer of the operating system.

Note

The COM-related examples in this chapter are exclusive to a 32-bit environment. Attempting to run these examples on a 64-bit environment will result in runtime errors unless you reset the project settings to specifically target a 32-bit (x86) operating system.

When considering the differences between COM and .NET, keep in mind one thing: COM is, to a large extent, where ...