COM Programming Introduction

Welcome to PowerBASIC's newest addition to the PowerBASIC programmer's arsenal:

Component Object Model (COM) programming

PowerBASIC now supports the creation of COM client and controller applications.  This section takes you on a guided tour of COM programming with PowerBASIC, starting off with discussions on COM theory and terminology, and proceeding to take you through Interface programming techniques used to create COM client applications.

These example applications will demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate a COM server application such as Microsoft Word™, and show how you can write simple routines to export data from your application to these Microsoft Office applications.

By the end of this section you should be able to start writing your own COM client applications, and add a whole new range of functionality to your existing PowerBASIC applications.

See Also

The PowerBASIC COM Browser

COM is an acronym?

Ok, but what actually is COM?

What is a COM component?

COM servers and COM clients

What is a Dispatch Interface?

Is there a Method to the madness?

COM initialization

Early-binding and Late-binding

Creating an Instance of an Object

Creating an early-bound object variable

Creating a late-bound object variable

How does the LET statement work?

New or pre-loaded?

Under the hood

Methods and Properties

Parameters

Positional and Named parameter passing

Return data

Enumerating collections

Converting COM code to PowerBASIC

Example COM controller application

COM Programming Summary