Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (Gotta love the way 
> half the stuff on MSDN turns out only to be applicable to Windows 7. 

That is the one problem with Microsoft's online documentation. They don't 
put the old stuff online in a way that's easy to find. If you don't stay on 
the upgrade treadmill, you need to buy copies of the documentation if you 
want to keep working.

> Reading further, it seems you have to link this special file into your 
> application. (That can't be good...) 

What kind of file? Probably a COM stub.

> And then it starts talking about 
> something called COM, and I got *completely* lost.
> 
> ...so now I'm trying to figure out what the hell COM is. :-/

Object-oriented remote procedure calls. You know what object-oriented is? 
You know what remote procedure calls are? Slap the two together. That's COM. 
It's typed and reflexive. It's basically one step up from DLL, in that it 
can be a DLL running in a separate process or even a separate machine (via 
"DCOM"). You're probably linking in a file that takes your local procedure 
calls, packages up (aka "marshalls") the arguments, and then sends them to 
the COM subsystem which delivers them to the appropriate task for execution.

It's basically how all software talks to other software on Windows if you 
don't want to be hard-coding stuff in at compile time like function offsets. 
It's how Word talks to Excel, how the help subsystem talks to IE, how 
ActiveX talks to IE, and how Windows Scripting Host talks to everything. 
Pretty much every line using an "object" in WSH is talking to that object 
via COM.


-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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