VISUAL STUDIO PREVIEW PORTABLE COM KNOCK

Microsoft released the product as a public preview at the end of 2015.This is only the first step for Visual Studio Mac. Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac come with a suite of tools for Unity. NET Core and with some troubles been able to add all the necessary. So Ive created a new Console Application.

I think the second is that they need a playground to figure out how to, excuse me here, 'unfuck' the core architecture of Visual Studio. The first interest is to bring non-Microsoft users in the fold with the hopes that they may go 'This ain't so bad, maybe I'll give other stuff a try'. I think VSCode serves two interests. I have an even crazier suspicion about what VSCode is really about.So if you've lived with Visual Studio for years, you know that it's been COM based for a looonnnnggg time (since inception). Given that you can now enable language support for around 470-ish languages, I don't think that their game here is to be a replacement for anything. VSCode, albeit made by Microsoft, goes way beyond Microsoft's core interests.

)COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables from C and other languages, so you can create and consume components in any language, and call back and forth between them. The COM system provided an approach to interoperability and reuse for a long time, but compared to our current generation of cross platform compatibility, the venerable COM system components are proving to be a significant legacy challenge for cross platform implementations.Glad you asked! One of my favorite topics. There are also extensive dot net facilities for repackaging and working with existing COM libraries through a Com Interop layer. This is related to the re-use and versioning issues known informally as 'DLL hell'.Most COM components are native C and C++ based, exposing a standardized COM interface for component reuse.Dot net was a new ecosystem, but much of the Win32 related dot net API is wrappers over existing native COM components. These are usually in the form of a DLL (Dynamic Link Library), libraries of COM components, packaged as a '.dll' file.

For some time MFC was the primary way of implementing COM interfaces in C++, but it was infamous for being horribly complex, with all its ugly macros, Hungarian notation, and bizarre programming conventions.Later on Microsoft came out with the C++-only ActiveX Template Library (ATL) , which, although it was still necessarily quite ugly, was a more elegant and powerful way of implementing COM components in C++, didn't have the baggage of supporting C, and let you implement COM/OLE/ActiveX components without the hideous MFC framework. You could implement 'tear off interfaces' that lazily create aggregated sub-objects on demand, useful for implementing callback interfaces.MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a set of C++ wrappers around the lower level Win32 interfaces, plus a huge framework for implementing GUI widgets and dialogs on top of Win32, and for wrapping rube-goldbergesque OLE Automation interfaces around C++ classes. But it also adds some object aggregation features that let you compose multiple sub-objects together by aggregation instead of using monolithic inheritance. Do whatever it was that Visual Basic programmers did.COM's IUnknown::QueryInterface method is essentially like C++'s dynamic_cast. Microsoft had to do something about that to mitigate the success disaster of VBX, so they invented COM.At the time, Microsoft was transitioning from Win16 to Win32, so they came up with the 32 bit COM definition, also known as OCX's, or OLE Controls, which they later called ActiveX, because COM was so hard to search for, and they wanted to take the spotlight away from Java with a new buzzword.So they brewed up a bunch of ugly C macrology that enabled C programmers (or Visual Studio wizards) to define COM interfaces in header and implementation files that just happened to lay out memory in the exact same way as vtables of C++ pure virtual classes.While C++ programs would use other ugly macros to declare actual honest-for-god C++ classes to implement COM interfaces.And Visual Basic programmers would. They were extremely popular and became a victim of their own success, after a whole industry grew up around them, and people started using them for all kinds of things they weren't intended for, and wanted to use them from other languages and frameworks like Borland.

Runtimes like Visual Basic knew how to integrate dual interfaces and could bind to the more efficient underlying COM interfaces, instead of going through the slower generic dynamic IDispatch interfaces.IDL also described the intricacies of DCOM interfaces (for in-process and networked remote procedure calls), parameter marshalling , and all kinds of other bizarre stuff. It also had a lot of persistence, runtime reflection, and user-interface related stuff for plugging components and dialogs together in windows, providing property sheets, editing and configuring controls, etc.MIDL supported defining components with 'dual interfaces' : both an OLE IDispatch interfaces taking variant type parameters, and also more efficient lower level COM interface taking primitive types. VB data types) and passing parameters to OLE IDispatch functions.OLE was the glue necessary for integrating COM components into the Visual Basic runtime, so it directly supported Visual Basic data types, calling conventions and semantics like indexed properties.OLE also provided an interface definition language (ILD) you could compile into binary type libraries, use to generate boilerplate C and C++ interfaces, and OLE also had COM interfaces and structures for providing those type libraries at runtime.

Visual Studio Preview Portable COM Knock

At this point in history, I think it's best to skip the 'component technology' middleman and integrate extensions directly into the JavaScript engine itself. Of course it has its own IDL and tooling, and suffers from many of the same problems that COM did.Mozilla didn't go nearly as far down the rabbit hole as Microsoft did, and later backtracked in their valiant 'deCOMification' aka 'deCOMtamination' and 'outparamdelling' efforts. But not a lot of third parties (except for me and a few other crazy people) ever used ActiveX on the Mac.However it did become quite fashionable for other organizations to create portable COM knock-offs to solve some (hopefully fewer) of the same problems, but which were incompatible with Microsoft's tooling and COM itself (which kind of missed the main points of COM, but hey).For example, Macromedia came up with MOA (Macromedia Open Architecture) , their COM-like plug-in extension mechanism for Director and other products.And Mozilla came up with XP/COM , for implementing components in Mozilla/Firefox/XULRunner/etc, enabling programmers to implement and consume XP/COM components in C++ or JavaScript.

Visual Studio For Mac Preview