On 10 December 2015 at 11:10, Arjang Assadi <arjang.ass...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does Anyone know about any Autogeneration tool to Wrap Existing Classes > and Generate COM exposed objects? I am doing it by hand, it tedious and > error prone, looks like an ideal use case for Roslyn or Resharper. > .NET can generate COM proxies all on its own: just regasm any assembly with anything "ComVisible(true)" in it, even without any other COM attributes. However, the result is quite ugly and generally only consumable from C++. VB6 only understands a subset of COM, and VBScript an even smaller subset. Also, I believe clsids are basically randomized in this mode so you may encounter dependency hells and dreaded diamonds when building/deploying new releases. As I'm sure you have discovered, long-term maintenance requires proper COM attributes. One way (that I have never tried) is to write COM interface files [1] and compile them into a typelib file with midl.exe [2]. Once you have the typelib, you can generate C# proxies using tlbimp.exe [3]. You can use this generated model directly or you can write some mapping functions between this generated model and your existing "nice" model. I personally found that hand-crafted proxies were still the simplest way to export classes that were VB6-friendly, and idiomatic VB. This was important to us because our VB6 programmer is not a .NET programmer. Also, all the "quirks" could be isolated in these proxies and documented there. No cross-contamination: the C# side was idiomatic C# and the VB side was idiomatic VB. Code generation also has other issues in .NET, but my views on this are known to the list and you can generally assume an anti-codegen stance from me. Poor build-system integration -> no hermetic builds -> randomly broken builds -> "works for me" bugs. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa378712.aspx [2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa367084.aspx [3] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tt0cf3sx.aspx -- Thomas Koster
