COM-to-.NET Interoperability—Advanced Topics

Abstract

The point of this chapter is to round out your knowledge of exposing.NET types to COM applications by examining a number of advanced techniques. The first major topic is to examine how.NET types can implement COM interfaces to achieve binary compatibility with other like-minded COM objects (a topic first broached in Chapter 7). Closely related to this topic is the process of defining COM types directly using managed code. Using this technique, it is possible to build a binary-compatible.NET type that does not directly reference a related interop assembly (and is therefore a bit more lightweight). As for the next major topic, you examine the process of building a customized version of tlbexp.exe while also addressing how to programmatically register interop assemblies at runtime. Finally, you wrap up by taking a deeper look at the.NET runtime environment and checking out how a COM client can be used to build a custom host for.NET types. In addition to being a very interesting point of discussion, you will see that a custom CLR host can simplify COM-to-.NET registration issues.