🦋 COM Memories
Reading COM and .NET Interoperability -- the initial chapters are all stuff I'm pretty familiar with but I am reading it anyway, to make sure I'm on Troelsen's wavelength when it gets interesting. A note at the beginning of Chapter 2, that the COM specification was released in '93, made me realize my programming career has progressed in lock step with Microsoft's Visual Basic API. Well I was a little late coming on board... I wasn't programming when VB was introduced... What I am thinking of when I talk about the Visual Basic API is something that really starts with COM.* My first project when I came to Xyris was to make some improvements to their RTList VBX control. (A VBX is a DLL which specifies a custom control for VB 3.x, and maybe VB 1 and 2 as well -- I don't know anything about versions prior to 3.x. VBX is the predecessor to OCX, the OLE Custom Control, which is what COM controls used to be called.) I worked on RTList throughout my years at Xyris, moving it from VBX to OCX and then rewriting the OCX control in ATL (enough acronyms yet?) Nowadays I am starting the move from COM to .NET -- I am about a year and a half late getting started. Microsoft continues to rule my world.
* On rereading I see that this is quite vague. What I am trying to get at is the notion of programming windows applications with Microsoft's suite of GUI development tools, of which VB is the original one. Visual Studio .NET is the current incarnation of this suite.
posted morning of Tuesday, October 7th, 2003
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