Hey!... I have an ftp you could upload it to if your nice enough, I can give you a loaner account, and when I get home set you up with a permanent one? you up for it? ICQ 98527804 MSN rmb_fct@hotmail.nospam.com Ryan Baillargeon

Yep, I read that of course.. But the fact remains that MSPress hass no mention on its site whatsoever that they even control the publication of this book. Ryan Baillargeon

My companbion CD is cracked in 4 pieces. Its of no use to me. Believe it or not, but the MSPress website has no information on "Inside COM". I did a search for the Book, its not listed, I did a search for the author, he's not listed, I did a search by topic, and under COM, the book is not listed. I did an ISBN search, and no results. WHAT THE FARK? ANyways, if you would be kind enough, could someone please zip up the cd contents and email them to me? Thank you very much. I will now forever know not to pile my programming books on top of eachother without first removing the companion cd's. my book order for "essential com" is in the process of going through management, i expect an answer sometime after my projects deadline. Ryan Baillargeon

My Amazon.com Order.... ----------------------------------------------------- Essential COM - Don Box ATL Internals Developers Workshop on COM and ATL 3.0 Multithreading Applications in Win32 Inside COM (I own already) ----------------------------------------------------- Any Suggestions / Comments? I will be developing under VS.NET in VC++. Ryan Baillargeon

Im in the process of developing an application that requires a imilar plugin architecture. However, unlike the last response, I have chosen COM as a way of handling such things. I have not solved, or identified all of the problems associated with doing it this way, but heres the basis for my design. - Component Categories in COM would allow my applicaiton to load any registered component on the system thats fits into my architecture. - Using a simple, but efficiently designed interface that will allow my app to identify, and understand each component. This interface would be common across every "plugin". - an IConfig interface could handle executing the plugins configuration, but the implementation would be specific to each plugin. - The main applicaiton contains the list of useable and loaded plugins. It could then easily generate a tree view that lists each plugin as a node along with access to the IConfig interface. - Almost every plugin will be presented as an child window in an MDI application. - My applicaiton would require multiple intances of each plugin. - I have not solved the problem of presented a common data source to each of the plugins, but im also new to COM and have a shipment of books from Amazon heading my way. Ryan Baillargeon

1.) CP has some great serial comm tutorials / classes / articles. 2.) you definately either want to write a dll or COM application and export your functions / interfaces for vb to use. - I did something similar, i created a data aquisition application in VBA (Excel) that uses a dll i wrote in straight c. The dll is a socket client that connects to intelligent hardware and collects data. I had to reformat the data in the DLL so I could export it to excel, which was a bitch, but in the end it worked perfectly. You should have no trouble what so ever. If your going the DLL route, be sure to look into IDL. Ryan Baillargeon

... speechless (takes brick and smashes over head) ... thank you Ryan Baillargeon

I have a class derived from CMultiDocTemplate, where I have overloaded the OpenDocumentFile and InitialUpdateFrame functions. I am adding this class as a member to my App Class. When I try and compile this bare bones MFC app, the linker is complaining that :: emo_test error LNK2005: "public: __thiscall CWorkSpaceDocTemplate::CWorkSpaceDocTemplate(unsigned int,struct CRuntimeClass *,struct CRuntimeClass *,struct CRuntimeClass *)" (??0CWorkSpaceDocTemplate@@QAE@IPAUCRuntimeClass@@00@Z) already defined in ChildFrm.obj as well as the destructor and the other functions i have overloaded? What is causing this? Ryan Baillargeon

My MDI App has two Document Types. One we can call a workspace. One we can call a doc. Ive registered each document type with the application using the framework. I have also added the code that only allows "1" workspace to be opened at a time. I have also destroyed the "view" of the workspace, because I want the data to be displayed in a dockable tree ctrl, which i have also created, and is a member of MainFrame. My Questions.... How do i get access to the workspace document (the current one) from my tree ctrl. If I have both a workspace open and multiple "docs", how can I place a call to GetDocument and get only the "workspace" document? excuse my silly questions, im not experienced with MFC or doc/view. Im moving along though. HELP ME KEEP MY MOMENTUM =) Ryan Baillargeon

THANK YOU! that was annoying. My Fault, I did it. Last Friday I was checking the calendar and for about 5 minutes my computers time was set to 24th of december. I guess I saved a couple files during that time. BAH HAHA.. ;p The funny thing is the problem would have fixed itself by next week, but i would have been annoyed as hell until then. THANK YOU AGAIN. Im always sweating the simple stuff. Ryan Baillargeon

Damn, that didnt work... - could it be that theres a file in the build configuration that is changing post build? therefore necessitating a new build every time? Ryan Baillargeon

For some reason, everytime i go to "Start Without Debugging", it tells me that my project configurations are out of date. Even after a complete rebuild? Has anyone else ever had this issue? Even after it rebuilds and runs, it tells me that the configuration is out of date, without a single source change? What gives? Ryan Baillargeon

You might want to try passing in a reference to a string instead of returning one from C++. I had to populate a shared data structure (UDT) between VB and C, however, one of the members of the UDT was a String. I passed a reference to an array of UDT's to my C DLL, and used SysAllocString on the String member. The data passed fine. All in All i was returning about 40K of data in the one function call. I dont have any useful code for you though. Question: Are you using IDL? Ryan Baillargeon Software Specialist Fuel Cell Technologies Inc.

The confusing part for me is that this is my first Document/View application and I am working from limited resources. Your suggestions are very helpful and I was already heading in that direction. Thank you. Ryan Baillargeon Software Specialist Fuel Cell Technologies Inc.

Read the help. Microsoft explains how to get by without using the class wizard. I actually like using the properties toolbar better. Look Here... Visual C++ Concepts: Porting and Upgrading ah, i might as well just dump the information. Where Are ClassWizard and WizardBar in Visual C++ .NET? In previous versions of Visual C++, ClassWizard and WizardBar helped you develop your MFC application. ClassWizard and WizardBar have been removed in Visual C++ .NET. This topic discusses where ClassWizard and WizardBar functionality can be accessed in Visual C++. WizardBar To add a new class In Class View or Solution Explorer, right-click the project node. On the shortcut menu, click Add and then click Add Class. To add a function to a class In Class View, right-click the class. On the shortcut menu, click Add and then click Add Function. To go to a definition Use the Navigation Bar, which is at the top of the text editor window. You can turn the Navigation Bar off from the General tab of the C/C++ folder, which is in the Text Editor folder of the Options dialog box (Tools menu). You can also use the Object Browser. See Searching for Symbols: Objects, Definitions and References for more information. ClassWizard For more information about wizards that add code to a project, see Adding Functionality with Code Wizards. To add a member variable In Class View, right-click the class to which you want to add a member variable. On the shortcut menu, click Add and then click Add Variable. For more information, see Adding a Member Variable. To add a handler for a message See Mapping Messages to Functions. To add methods and properties to automation interfaces In Class View, right-click an interface that supports automation. On the shortcut menu, click Add and then click Add Method or Add Property. For more information, see Adding a Method or Adding a Property. To add ActiveX events In Class View for an ActiveX control project, right-click the class to which you want to add an event. On the shortcut menu, click Add and then click Add Event. For more information, see Adding an Event. To add a handler (function) for a user-interface item Select the item in Resource View. For example, select a button. Press F4 to open the Properties window and click the ControlEvents button. Select a message in the left column and click Add from the right column. The function will appear in Class View. For more information, see Adding an MFC Message Handler. See Also

Has anyone ever programmed an application using a project/workspace model. I am writing an MFC / MDI applicaiton and I need to replicate the same idea that VS uses. The user will be working with a collection of documents. Are there any articles / tutorials that anyone knows of? Ryan Baillargeon

Im having a problem with my COM object. The IDL file below describes my interface. In VB when I do a CreateObject, i get a type mismatch. When I try and declare a type "vbtopicstruct", i get an automation error 440? ANy help? import "oaidl.idl"; import "ocidl.idl"; import "unknwn.idl"; typedef [ uuid(C21871A0-33EB-11D4-A13A-BE2573A1120F), helpstring("Topic Structure Definition") ] struct vbTopicStruct { long a; long b; long c; } vbTopicStruct; [ object, uuid(3C6C8D49-E7B3-4799-9EF6-37825D43064A), helpstring("IConvertTopic Interface Definition") ] interface IConvertTopic : IUnknown { HRESULT ReadTopicsFromFile([in] BSTR filename, [in, out]vbTopicStruct *topics); HRESULT WriteTopicsToFile ([in] BSTR filename, [in, out]vbTopicStruct *topics); }; [ uuid(3C6C8D4B-E7B3-4799-9EF6-37825D43064A), helpstring("Topic Conversion Interface Definition Library") ] library ConvertTopicDefinitionLibrary { importlib ("stdole32.tlb"); importlib ("stdole2.tlb"); struct vbTopicStruct; interface IConvertTopic; } Ryan Baillargeon Software Specialist

Okay, so in a past project I had used IDL to expose a UDT i had in a dll to an excel spreadsheet. The DLL in that case was a straight C++ DLL, no MFC. In this case I have an MFC DLL. I want to expose a UDT to the excel spreadsheet. I have tried, but it does not work. I have the UDT defined in my IDL file, but when I use "references" tool in excel, I dont have access to the type? The code is below. Am I doing something wrong here?

[
uuid(A1CCE58E-553D-4394-828C-5227D4526293),
helpstring("Topic Conversion Library For Tag List")
]

/////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Library Declaration			
////////////////////////////////////////////////

library TopicConversionLib
{
///////////////////////////////////////////////
// Topic Data Type Definition		
///////////////////////////////////////////////
// This will be used to "transport" data info
// from teh DLL to the VB application
///////////////////////////////////////////////
	
typedef struct _vb_topic_data
{
short	t_num;	 // Topic Number	Short
float	t_value; // Topic Value		Float
BSTR	t_name;	 // Topic Name		String
}	VbTopicData;

[
	helpstring("topic stuff"),
	dllname("topic_conversion.dll")
]
module topic_conversion
{

};
}

Ryan Baillargeon Software Specialist Fuel Cell Technologies Inc.

I have a large data strucutre that is used in an embedded C application. I have replicated the strucutre in VC++ and put a class wrapper around it. This data structure contains mostly basic data types. However there are a few fields that are fixed length arrays (char []) as string placeholders. I need to transport this structure to VBA. I have used IDL in order to solve this before. But I was wondering if you guys have any other reccommendations. ? We are using an excel spread sheet as a tag list for our product. I will use this data to generate a binary file that will be used by our embedded software to configure hardware at run-time. Could the VB Gurus please tell me how I can transfer this data to the DLL... what is the best way??? Lets say I store the excel data in a vb data strucute (and use an array of these strucutres). can I pass a pointer to that block of memory to my dll. Can I go in reverse as well? I know there might have to be translation. Im a little stuck here, please help.. Ryan Baillargeon Software Specialist Fuel Cell Technologies Inc.

I have a large data strucutre that is used in an embedded C application. I have replicated the strucutre in VC++ and put a class wrapper around it. This data structure contains mostly basic data types. However there are a few fields that are fixed length arrays (char []) as string placeholders. I need to transport this structure to VBA. I have used IDL in order to solve this before. But I was wondering if you guys have any other reccommendations. ? We are using an excel spread sheet as a tag list for our product. I will use this data to generate a binary file that will be used by our embedded software to configure hardware at run-time. Any suggestions would be appreciated, until then Im using IDL. Ryan Baillargeon