Articles Tagged “COM”
20 articles tagged “COM”, newest first.
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How the Clipboard and Drag & Drop Work — Handling OLE Data Transfer Correctly in Business Apps
Paste an Excel table and the formatting falls apart; close the source app and you can no longer paste — both come from the clipboard placing the same content...
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Windows Shell Integration Today — Context Menus, File Associations, and What Changed in Windows 11
Why a Windows 11 context menu hides items behind "Show more options", explained from the extension → ProgID → verb association basics through classic shell-e...
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Calling COM and .NET from PowerShell — Widening What Your Scripts Can Reach
A practical guide to calling .NET classes from PowerShell, embedding C# and Win32 APIs with Add-Type, driving COM, cleaning up leftover Excel processes, why ...
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DLL and COM Interface Backward Compatibility — A Decision Table for Which Changes Break Callers
Which changes to a DLL or COM component actually break their callers? We lay out the three layers of compatibility — binary, source, and behavioral — a decis...
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Do Business Apps Run on Windows on Arm? — The Reality of x64 Emulation (Prism) and Native DLLs/COM
An answer, aimed at developers and IT staff, to 'will our business app run on Windows on Arm?' Covers how x64 emulation (Prism) works, the layers it can't re...
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Why EXCEL.EXE Processes Remain After C# Excel COM Automation — Reference Release Patterns and the Replacement Decision
A practical look at why EXCEL.EXE processes remain running after automating Excel from C# via Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel, explained through COM reference...
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Choosing Windows Inter-Process Communication ── A Decision Table for Named Pipes / TCP / gRPC / Shared Memory / COM
How do you choose the right way for Windows applications to talk to each other? This article organizes named pipes, local TCP, gRPC, shared memory, file-base...
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Windows App Outsourcing and Custom Software Development: What to Sort Out Before You Ask
Before commissioning Windows app outsourcing or custom software development, here is how to sort out existing software modification, device integration, COM/...
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A Developer's Strange Love, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows
Windows is a hassle. But that hassle is the hassle of an OS that has carried real-world business on its back.
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Why ActiveX Stops Working in Office 2024/Microsoft 365 and How to Diagnose It
When ActiveX stops working in Office 2024/Microsoft 365, work through the causes in order: default disablement, 32-bit/64-bit mismatch, COM registration, dep...
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Registration and Bitness Pitfalls in COM/OCX/ActiveX Development
Why COM/OCX components fail with 0x80040154 or break outside your dev machine: bitness mismatches, regsvr32 vs Regasm, HKCR views, and admin-rights traps.
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What Is Reg-Free COM - Using COM Without Registration
An overview of Reg-Free COM basics, the roles of activation contexts and manifests, the benefits, the limitations, and how to decide when to use it in practice.
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How to Build Excel Report Output - COM / Open XML / Templates
The design of Excel report output changes considerably depending on whether you automate Excel itself, generate xlsx files directly, or keep existing VBA. As...
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Using a .NET 8 DLL from VBA with Full Typing - COM Exposure and dscom TLB
Call .NET 8 code from VBA with early binding: expose a class library to COM, generate a TLB with dscom, and register the comhost DLL. Sample code on GitHub.
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What Are COM / ActiveX / OCX? - The Differences and Relationships Explained
A practical guide to what COM is, what ActiveX is, and what OCX is - covering their differences and relationships, the connection to OLE, where they are used...
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How to Handle ActiveX / OCX Today - A Keep / Wrap / Replace Decision Table
When you find ActiveX / OCX, how to choose between keeping, wrapping, and replacing it, covering 32-bit / 64-bit, registration, browser dependencies, and ven...
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An Introduction to Media Foundation - Understanding the API Through a COM Lens
We explain what Media Foundation is, together with the basic vocabulary of Windows media APIs - COM, HRESULT, IMFSourceReader, MFTs - in the order you should...
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COM STA/MTA Fundamentals - Threading Models and How to Avoid Hangs
Why UI threads are STA, how marshaling across apartments works, and why COM calls hang without message pumping - with diagrams and a deadlock example.
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A Worked Example of a COM Bridge for Calling a 64-bit DLL from a 32-bit App
When a 32-bit app cannot call a 64-bit DLL directly, a COM bridge can connect them. We walk through the approach, including the Windows constraints, the arch...
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What Is COM? - Why the Design of Windows COM Is Still Beautiful Today
We explain what COM is from the perspective of Windows COM interface design, IUnknown, GUIDs, and binary compatibility, and why it still holds up today.