Interacting with the 7-zip Com dll

Hey everyone,

I'm a good vb programmer but know very little about c++, and I want to make an activex wrapper for the 7-zip COM dll. (7-zip is a compressor, much better than zip and rar)

I've made wrappers for the zlib and bzip2 dlls before, but those two had very good documentation and I was able to find some good examples of it on the net. These dlls had exported functions, so the wrappers were pretty easy to make.

7-zip has no documentation I can find and the author just suggests learning how to interact with COM dlls.

Can anybody give any suggestions on how to go about doing this?
Anyplace I can get some information about VB interacting with COM dlls (not activex)?

I doubt it's better than rar, but have a look at bwtzip at www.nuwen.net

It's a compressor that is just behind rar and it's source code is available for download, so you can check it out.

I'd recommend not using the dll, then again I'm old fashioned.

Actually, I've done some testing and as long as you know which options to use 7-zip is on average around 10 to 15 percent better compression I'd say.

Thanks for the heads up on bwtzip.

It has no documentation at all? Not even a list of objects and interfaces?

Interacting with a COM dll is easy enough, but only if you know the interfaces.

it is open source though, so somebody should be able to understand the interfaces.

But thats where the rub is, the source is in c++ which I do not undersand.

Learn it :)

hmm..even if he started 24h per day learning c++ he would take weeks and months just to make that little project..

But it's an investment in the future :D

How about giving us a link to that open source project?

www.7-zip.org