Interest in our COM products is still very strong, which has led to more questions on the deployment side of things. As such I thought
we’d delve into an interesting but often overlooked method of deploying ActiveX controls with applications. It’s called RegFree COM. That’s right, as the name implies it removes the need to RegSvr .ocx
files or register them during deployment.
This has an impact especially with the Windows 10 UAC and
registry lockdowns across networks. The process is pretty
straightforward, you build a '.manifest' file for your
application that contains all the information needed to call
your .ocx files.
Here is the breakdown… you will need an IDE that will
compile down to an executable in order to attach the
manifest. In our sample below we will simply use the method
for including the .manifest file with the application.exe, but there are ways to build the
manifest into the actual executable. For more information on
that do a Web Search on MT.exe and manifest.
Basically you can point the executable you are running to
the OLE control you want to use and specify the GUIDS for
the TypeLib and Class in the .manifest file thus eliminating the need to check the registry (you can do a quick
web search on RegFree COM for more on the background story).
We'll focus on how you can set one up to use DBI controls. As you are going to need both the typelib ID and class ID you may want to trackdown a copy of OLEVIEW. That little tool shipped back with VisualStudio 6 (I think it may actually go back to 4) but you can find a copy here...
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d0kh9f4c.aspx
So basically let’s start a small sample app for testing purposes... we'll toss ctxList on a form and call our app ctxListTest.exe
Add a couple of node items in the firstdraw
event and
build your app. Now let’s copy our ctxList.ocx
control to
a folder in your app path called bin. We are then
going to create a file called
ctxListTest.exe.manifest in the same folder as
the executable. You can also check out some
articles on building the manifests into the
executables, here are a
couple of command line utilities available from
Microsoft that will handle this, but for our
example we are going to use the "deploy with
executable" method. The XML is going to look
like so...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <assemblyIdentity name="ctxList.exe" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" /> <file name="bin\ctxList.ocx" asmv2:size="118784"> <typelib tlbid="{F5A21BA6-2C08-11D5-A85D-0080C8DFC881}" version="6.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" /> <comClass clsid="{F5A21BA6-2C08-11D5-A85D-0080C8DFC881}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{F5A21BA6-2C08-11D5-A85D-0080C8DFC881}" progid="ctxList.ctxListCtrl.6" description="ctxList Control" /> </file> </assembly> Now you can see we have a single <file> tag in our XML, you can have as many as you need to define for your app. Notice this one is for ctxDate, we are going to mod it for use with ctxList by changing the tag properties as follows... This info is from the actual exe file properties... -orig-<assemblyIdentity name="ctxList.exe" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" />
-new-<assemblyIdentity name="ctxListTest.exe" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" /> Now for the OCX part... -orig- <file name="bin\ctxList.ocx" asmv2:size="118784"> <typelib tlbid="{F5A21BA6-2C08-11D5-A85D-0080C8DFC881}" version="6.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" /> <comClass clsid="{F5A21BA6-2C08-11D5-A85D-0080C8DFC881}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{F5A21BA6-2C08-11D5-A85D-0080C8DFC881}" progid="ctxDATE.ctxListCtrl.6" description="ctxList Control" /> </file> -new- <file name="bin\ctxList.ocx" asmv2:size="471040"> <typelib tlbid="{38EC7E50-6A01-4727-88E7-47788ABD54FE}" version="6.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" /> <comClass clsid="{2B447B04-4CDC-4F52-915C-694DDCAD79F4}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{38EC7E50-6A01-4727-88E7-47788ABD54FE}" progid="ctxLIST.ctxListCtrl.6" description="ctxList Control 6.0" /> </file> So your XML text for the ctxList will be... <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"
xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <assemblyIdentity name="ctxListTest.exe" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" /> <file name="bin\ctxList.ocx" asmv2:size="471040"> <typelib tlbid="{38EC7E50-6A01-4727-88E7-47788ABD54FE}" version="8.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" /> <comClass clsid="{2B447B04-4CDC-4F52-915C-694DDCAD79F4}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{38EC7E50-6A01-4727-88E7-47788ABD54FE}" progid="ctxLIST.ctxListCtrl.8" description="ctxList Control
8.0" /> </file> </assembly>
full view
If you wish to test this on your dev machine, you'll have to regsvr32/u ctxList.ocx (in your
Studio Controls for COM install folder) then if you did everything right your app should run as normal, rename the ctxListTest.exe.manifest to something else and run it and you should get a class unregistered error.
As always from all of us here in
support, take are and have a great programming day!
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