Preloading DLL during app startup?

[Achichincle]

I'm not sure that I'm even stating this correctly but...

My app has a reference to an activex dll that I wrote. It contains all my buiness objects to separate them from the presentation layer...

Now, when I first start the app, I notice a lag time when one of the business objects in the dll is first called. It appears that this is due to the computer having to load the dll initially since all subsequent calls to the objects in that dll are much quicker.

How do I preload(?) the dll so that by the time the app finishes starting there won't be that initial lag. I understand that the lag will be now shifted to the app's initial load but that's fine.

I saw something about this somewhere but I can't seem to find it again.

Thanks in advance.

[plenderj]

Perhaps you could have a splash screen ?
Then when the splash screen loads, you load but dont show another form. That form then contains all the dll references.

- jamie

[Achichincle]

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm just getting bogged down on the how to get the dll to load.

I suppose I could just call on a 'Startup' procedure in the dll but isn't there another way with typelibs?

let's say I have in my referenced dll some 'huge' tables
like:


MyTable(0)=1234
...
MyTable(9876)=19283746

in a class named MyClass in the class initialize event

Of course, I have

Public MyTable(9876) as long 'in a module

Dim asd as MyClass 'just after Option explicit

and at form load event,

Set asd = new MyClass

that will bring you to the class initialize event and your table will be in memory for good.

the lag time is at app start only and table will be in memory as long the app is running.

does it answer your question?

[Achichincle]

Thanks Yaz...

That's pretty much what I ended up doing. Creating a class solely for the purpose of loading some global objects and classes then created an instance of that object during startup.