Microsoft OLE and COM

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whitequill
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Microsoft OLE and COM

Post by whitequill »

I was just watching a video; Principles of OLE 2.0, lecture by Tony Williams. It sound like OLE is integral to the way Windows functions as a whole. I was wondering how much of this is understood as it is hard to find information about the compound file format and using OLE in programming.
I understand .NET is the thing but, I recognize the OLE architecture in clicking to edit some embedded object from working with other applications in the past.

How much of this architecture is understood and/or implemented in WINE?
dacha
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Re: Microsoft OLE and COM

Post by dacha »

Interesting video, thank you for that link.

In the early days, Wine didn't do much COM or do it very well, and people often used Microsoft's implementation ("DCOM98") on Wine instead. That improved over time - it had to - COM is so widely used on Windows (DirectX, DirectShow, our "Internet Explorer" components, MSI for installing software, the Rich Edit control, etc.) that almost nothing would work without it.

The Wine Developer's Guide has a chapter on how Wine implements COM:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Developer% ... OM_in_Wine

These days our COM implementation is very good, but networked DCOM wasn't working when last I checked (ie. COM components on Wine couldn't communicate with COM components on Windows). I am not sure whether it was added since.
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