Hi, It actually sounds like a nifty idea. Everyone seems to have a serial port and the interface protocol is a bonus; however, if there is no hardware with which to interface, it's difficult to do the testing. I think it would be rather keen to create devices (such as infrared receivers) to be able to provide the ability to dim and/or turn on/off lights. (i.e. from the home entertainment system remote control.) Regards, Joe

Hi Frank, Did you make sure that you had all of the required dependencies for your component installed including the Visual Basic runtime DLL required by your component? Also, if your component references others, they may have references to not only other components, but perhaps versions (or different versions) of DLLs which they require. If those aren't installed, they will most likely fail to load. Sometimes it takes a bit of investigation to determine all dependencies and even the dependencies of those required for them to be used. Regards, Joe

Hi Marcus, Are you referring to calling into a managed C++ control library used by a VB.NET application? If so, there shouldn't be much you need to know. If you are trying to create a C/C++ DLL with the same "__stdcall" calling conventions used by the Win32 API, that keyword itself should be what you need for your C++ DLL. If you can describe exactly what you need (i.e. both languages, versions, etc.) I can be of more help. Regards, Joe

Greets, Yes, a comment I have is that there is not enough context; you can't see what run_undetached returns and it's not clear as to whether or not CreateWindow() returned null. What are you trying to do that I may have missed from your code? Regards, Joe

Hi, Your best approach would probably be to create an MSI installation package for your component. It will package all of the dependencies required (if necessary) and also register your component into the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) if you create that folder in your installation project and ensure that you strongly name your component by signing it with the generated key. If you are referring to other means of COM component registration, it still requires the registration of a type library which can be created and installed as part of the package as well. Regards, Joe

Greets, You should be able to insert a newline as a CR/LF pair, but I would use the System.Environment.Newline static member to add the newline based on the environment. If you're referring to adding a newline while entering text into one, perhaps Ctrl-Enter may help. Regards, Joe

Hi, From what I have seen, the DLLs created are the generated interop assemblies used to access the COM object your project uuses. It looks like .NET adds a (arguably) nice wrapper object over COM in order to marshall the calls between the managed code and the component in use. Not all questions answered, sorry. Regards, Joe

Greets, It is annoying when your UI isn't repainting when performing lengthy operations. However, Application.DoEvents() may do the trick for sending the appropriate messages required to repaint. In C#, "\r\n" is the same as the chr(10) and chr(13) pair. That is what they are if you need to find them. "\r" is chr(10) (carriage return) and "\n" is newline. In the old days, a person that didn't send a newline really made things difficult to read. :) BTW, the .NET library has a platform specific way of using a carriage return / newline pair, that's using the System.Environment.Newline property. Regards, Joe

I dunno Doc, there's a lot of carrots out there. :)

Greets, Is the interface for the COM+ application which is installed on the server also available to your application on the client machine? Did you export the application from the server and install it on the client machine from which your application is running? When I refer to application, you can install your component in COM+ on the server machine, then use COM+ services to export an MSI package that will install the necessary information on the client needed to make the call remotely. Regards, Joe

Greets, If I'm not mistaken, MFC has its own DllMain hidden deep down inside. Perhaps you should find it (since the code is included) and mimic what it does inside in order to support MFC in your COM object. However, this might already have been done in the past. Regards, Joe

Hi David, He probably could, but that would be due to my ignorance. I did some research and found that the cast operator in C# can't be overloaded, but that C# did allow the use of "explicit" and "implicit" as keywords to allow for that sort of behavior. Regards, Joe

Hi there, No problem, actually, I've used that approach in the past on other project. It does work nicely and the best thing about it is that it's configurable after you've written the code that uses it. (You just have to make sure you don't break what you feed the code!) It's a good way of branding Web sites, nice to see someone out there thinking that way. :) Regards, Joe

Hi, I usually use the HACK task in the event that I need to employ a quick solution to a problem that may (or if not maintained) require a more well-thought out solution to a problem that had to be immediately addressed. The interesting thing about those types of additions are that they usually evoke thought as to what caused the problem and make one wonder if other parts of the code suffer from the same. Regards, Joe

Hi Brent, It sounds almost like you want to add meta tags to your meta files. :) Actually, it's not uncommon to have a file template that is pre-processed in order to feed it to the appropriate consumer. A classic example is the pre-processor .h files used by C/C++ compilers. However, in your case, you want to take existing XML files and use them directly with text replacement. Probably not very easy to do with the XML parser directly, but perhaps you can consider this: Create your own "XML template" with a different file extension; allow a certain delimiter to define 'tags' in the XML file which don't clash with the XML syntax. Create a component which can take a collection of name-value pairs, and the name of your file to read the file, parse out the 'tags', and replace the name of the tag with the value in the collection (with the tag name as the key). The resulting text replacement is then the new "dynamic XML" that you can then feed to your application. There are probably other ways of doing such with XSL, but that's one realm I've not yet trodden. Regards, Joe

Hi Willem, It looks like an overloaded cast operator. You'd probably want to consider using a 'Single' data type first of all in C#, but when it comes to the code using "(float)MyClass" on your particular class, you'd probably want to replace that with a method call or property that returns the single-point floating result. Regards, Joe

Hi Terance, If your code needs to deploy items which don't already have .NET framework code to do so (i.e. message queues, etc.), you can add an installation component to your application which has callbacks that can act in the context of installing and uninstalling your application. If you use "Add new item..." to your project, you should find an installer class. This derived class has overrides you can use during the installation process to do work during the install, rollback, commit and uninstall portions of installation. MSDN online provides a walkthrough on how to create a database, the same example can be adapted to add your stored procedure to the database during installation. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsintro7/html/vxwlkWalkthroughUsingCustomActionToCreateDatabaseDuringInstallation.asp Regards, Joe