A.1 Working with COM type libraries

Note: This appendix does not apply to the Functional Developer Personal Edition.

Microsoft COM interfaces and implementations of those interfaces are described on disk by type libraries. Type libraries can reside in stand-alone files with the extension .TLB, or within files containing executable code such as .DLL, .EXE, and .OCX files. Often the file that implements a COM component also contains the type library representing that component.

Functional Developer includes a tool that can read the contents of a type library and generate Dylan code to act as a client to the COM interfaces and classes the type library describes, or to act as a server implementing the type library's interfaces and classes.

You can invoke this type library tool from a Functional Developer project by including a specification file in the project. A specification file describes what type library to translate and in what way the translation will be used. Specification files have the extension .SPEC. You can find more details about specification files in section Section A.4 on page 185.

To make using the tool easier, the New Project wizard allows you to create a project containing a specification file.

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Getting Started with Functional Developer - 31 MAR 2000