Wednesday 1 September 2004 — This is 20 years old. Be careful.
We’ve got an aggravating problem with a C# project, and I’m hoping someone out there can point me in the right direction.
Working in Dev Studio .NET, we have two projects: a C++ executable that implements a COM interface, and a C# executable that calls that interface. The C# project has a reference to the C++ executable. The COM interface is under development, so it is constantly changing: new methods being added, the interface definitions changing, and so on. We’re seeing a number of bad results.
On some developers machines, the projects build fine, but then execution fails: COM calls from C# to C++ are going to the wrong entry points (a call to method A ends up calling method B instead). On the build machine, the code won’t compile. A change in the number of parameters to a method results in a compile error, as if the interface definition hadn’t changed.
We’ve tried all sorts of combinations of gacutil and COM registration, and haven’t found the secret handshake that just makes it work.
Does anyone know the elusive answer?
Comments
1) register the COM DLL
2) copy new primary interops
3) using regasm with the /codebase option to register the interops.
We do not bother installing the interops in the GAC, since they change too often. The most important step is the registering of the interops, because this lets Visual Studio know where to find them.
I saw something similar yesterday. I'm not sure how you're generating the wrappers -- our solution has both the C# and C++ (ATL) projects in it -- and we used the Add Reference/COM dialog to add the output of the C++ project to the C# project.
We ran into two problems:
1. If you've got ActiveX controls, you can't rebuild the C++ project, because it's still open in the designer. The solution: close all windows and restart VS.
2. If you change the interface (this seems to be what you're seeing), the new members won't appear. You need to restart VS, which causes it to rebuild the wrappers when the solution is reloaded. There doesn't seem to be a forced rebuild option anywhere.
However, we've not got as far as being clever enough to register the interops in the GAC, or anything like that, so you might be well past the problems we're seeing.
I was playing with using tlbimp and aximp as custom build steps, but I 've not got very far with that yet.
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