Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> 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.

So... would it for example be possible to write some gizmo that enables 
you to insert a mathematical formula into a Word document without Word 
crashing? (Or an organisation chart, for that matter?)

Could you write a plugin for Excel that draws some new kind of chart? Or 
maybe be able to write macros in Haskell instead of VisualBasic? (You 
know how normally you can write a macro in VB and then use it as a 
normal function in cells of the spreadsheet? Well, what if you wanted to 
use Haskell instead? Is that possible, technically?)

> You use it to do all the sorts of things you use IPC for (pipes, 
> sockets, etc) in Linux land.

When I develop things that have to talk to each other, I generally just 
use TCP. (Because almost all programming languages know how to do it. As 
a somewhat nice side effect, it also makes it possible to run components 
on seperate machines.) I have no idea what the overhead is though.

(Before now I've written some code in one programming language, then had 
it use TCP to talk to a Tcl script to provide a front-end. Damn, if only 
there was 1 programming language that had *all* the features I need...)

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