Any good resource on COM?

VRonin

Hi, despite managing to dodge this bullet for a couple of years it finally hit me. I'll have to use an MS COM API in my Qt Application.

If you used this system before do you know a good resource (i.e. manual/book) you'd recommend?

Thanks in advance

SGaist

Hi,

What COM element do you need to use ?

ambershark

@VRonin said in Any good resource on COM?:

despite managing to dodge this bullet

Sorry buddy... I'm still trying to continue dodging that.

I used COM a bit before I got into Qt back in 1999/2000. It was awful. It was one of the driving forces behind me finding a better way to code GUIs. It led me to Qt so it was cool for that. One of the worst technologies ever invented imo.

kshegunov

@VRonin said in Any good resource on COM?:

If you used this system before do you know a good resource (i.e. manual/book) you'd recommend?

I used to do some of that when I was young, but sadly don't have anything on hand. If I recall correctly one also needs a very special kind of dev environment to use it - one that knows what IDL files are and how to generate the binary interface based on them. I have no idea how QtAx* deals with that to be honest, or if it does at all.

My best advice is to pull up a couple of tutorials from the internet and glance through them, it shouldn't be very hard to grasp the idea, however bad it may be ... ;)

@ambershark said in Any good resource on COM?:

One of the worst technologies ever invented imo.

I second that.

VRonin

@SGaist said in Any good resource on COM?:

What COM element do you need to use ?

That's the right question

Unfortunately I have no Idea, I have to interface with a 3rd party service and the only API they offer is COM so I have no other choice. It's a send command->receive answer kind of thing

hskoglund

Hi, agreed that 20 years ago COM was pretty awful and finicky. But if your 3rd party service software is younger than that (say written after the turn of the century) then most of the strange/bizarre parts of COM has been abandoned and what remains are rather well documented on StackOverflow etc.

For example, if interfacing to your 3rd party service means pulling in a .dll that is straighforward to do using just Qt's COM API, there are lots of examples as well.

Eddy

Hi,

I have a similar quest and stumbled upon this article which seems promising:
obtain-type-information-of-idispatch-based-com-objects-from-managed-code

Your title looks like a good pointer for people posting the same kind of questions, so I put it here.

Eddy