> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>
>>> Cross-process object-oriented calling.  Basically, remote procedure 
>>> calls and everything you need to do it "right" instead of half-assed.
>>
>> OK. So... if I actually knew how to do all this stuff, what useful 
>> things could I do with it?
> 
> It's the fundamental technology that Windows parts use to talk to other 
> Windows parts. You could write a program that starts up Word and Excel, 
> loads a spreadsheet, clips a range out and pastes it into your Word 
> document. You can take a blob of code that someone wrote to manage 
> calendars, and a blob of code that someone wrote to manage email, and 
> paste them together to make an email-sending reminder applciation. You 
> can write components for (for example) decompressing your compressed 
> movie stream, and plug them into Windows Media Player without having to 
> recompile either one. It's used for everything from plug-ins, 
> specialized widgets, active agents running in the background, 
> distributed processing, and embedded programming languages for 
> applications.
> 
> It's basically library++, "active" libraries that can run by themselves 
> as independent components.
> 
> It's "component" stuff, which I don't think Linux ever really got around 
> to implementing, or at least not using in any sort of consistent way.
> 
> You use it to do all the sorts of things you use IPC for (pipes, 
> sockets, etc) in Linux land.
> 

Let me add some: things like showing custom thumbnails for a file format 
(like Windows does by default for pictures) is done by implementing a 
COM interface. explorer.exe will tell your COM object to generate the 
thumbnails.

Same for adding items to the context menu, and to the drag context menu 
(like WinZIP and other file archivers do, right-drag a zip and it will 
have an "extract here" along with the default "move here" and "copy here").

Adding toolbars to explorer and/or Internet Explorer uses COM too, so 
there's a technology advertisers know well[1].

Embedding and linking objects in Office documents uses OLE, which is 
based in COM. I think WordPad is a program Microsoft used to test OLE 
mechanisms, then they decided to release it.

Guess what ActiveX is based on.

[1] http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v391/brownpau/friends_ie.jpg

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