Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit

Chapter 22. Controlling Other Applications Using Automation

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• Creating a reference to an automation library

• Creating an instance of an automation server

• Manipulating the objects of an automation server

In Hour 16, “Designing Objects Using Classes,” you learned how to use classes to create objects. In that hour, I mentioned that objects could be exposed to outside applications. Excel, for example, exposes most of its functionality as a set of objects. The process of using objects from another application is called automation. The externally accessible objects of an application compose its object model. Using automation to manipulate a program’s object model enables you to reuse components. You can use automation with Excel, ...