Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions, Second Edition

Understanding OLE

In early versions of 16-bit Windows (such as version 3.1), Microsoft introduced a new concept called object linking and embedding (OLE). The idea behind this new technology was that you could embed an object within another object. If you were sending an email message using Microsoft Mail, for example, you could paste a copy of a Word document into it. This was very cool because the receiver could just double-click on the attached document (which was displayed as an icon). That would tell your word processor to load the document automatically. If the word processor were not already running, it would first be launched and would then load the document. Linking objects with other objects was a great idea, but OLE itself was quite ...