Slashdot Mirror

Most COM/ActiveX objects are easy to use: simply CoCreate the object and start calling the methods. You may have to QI for the appropriate interfaces, but that's no sweat. It's barely harder than using a regular C++ object.

If the object only supports the IDispatch interface, which is probably the case for VB, then things get a little more tedious. Packaging up DISPPARAMS and calling Invoke() is a PITA. Fortunately there are helper classes. MFC has COleDispatchDriver, and the MFC dependencies can be removed, such as with XYDispDriver.

#import will also build the wrappers for you if you have a typelib.

Since when has Windows been considered cheap?? What is the source on this?? Windows hasn't dropped in price since 3.1 came out, and its only been getting more expensive since then. Just look at the retail tag for WinXP!

While it is true that the price of Windows hasn't dropped since 3.1, it has only become more expensive with the introduction of XP ($99 upgrade for XP Home, compared to $89 for win95 through winme). One rationalization for that could be that since XP is really based on NT, it's actually cheaper (standard NT upgrades run around $200). Also, that's ignoring the $49 upgrade specifically from Win98SE to WinME. On top of that, comparing the price of Windows XP Pro to Win9x is a red herring -- a better comparison would be Win2K Pro to WinXP Pro -- or roughly $200 upgrade vs. roughly $200 upgrade. And to top it all of, if you factor in inflation the prices have actually dropped.

Also, since when are buggy DLLs and undocumented DCOM features considering "making life easy" for programmers? If anything, the Windows API is buggy, confusing, and mind-numbing.

And there's never been a buggy .so released for linux? Bah, forget I asked. As far as DCOM goes, I can't comment as I've used it very little. However, for other technologies (COM, ADO, MFC, ATL, XML vis MSXML and HTML via MSHTML, SOAP, and so on), I've never had any problems finding abundant documentation via MSDN, books (MS Press and others), third-party sites (The Code Project for example), and so on. I realize that "hidden" interfaces exist in the various Windows lines, but I've rarely seen anything those hidden APIs can do that was not exposed through a win32 or set of win32 functions. As for the the win32 api itself being "mind numbing", I suggest you try something like WTL -- a template library based on ATL that provides MFC-like capabilities without the MFC-like bloat (WTL is statically linked into your binary, but is not large enough to make a significant impact on footprint).

C Sharp Index
GotDotNet
CodeProject
CodeJunkies
ASPNextGen
The Collective

Just to mention a few...

Arre there any sites like this that aren't focused on MS-Windows? I'd prefer a 'generic' site, but one with a Linux/Open Source/*nix slant would be fine also.

Nope, as explained on codeproject in the Visit to Redmond articles, being fully ANSI compliant with VC++ would break MFC and some other things :)