BugSlasher

Microsoft has done a nice job when it designed Component Object Model, also known as COM, even if  the system’s complexity was painful for some developers. To fix that, they first created Vb6 (well…no comment) to soften the burden of consuming COM objects, while C++ was still a little bit rough to use (but anything concerning COM was possible !). After a few years, they finally created the .NET framework. As a fair part of the Windows architecture was based on COM and COM+, they had to make the most popular language (C# and VB.NET) of the platform compatible with it. I’m currently working on a system where the .NET code use a lot of COM to communicate with other parts of the system, and I can tell you that even most of the features of COM can be used, sometimes you have to dig deeper to make .NET component compatible with other languages. I saw a few custom marshaler described on the net, but no one done to marshal an array of “anything” (called VARIANT in COM), so I thought it could be interesting to share it with others.

Read more…