Call for new forum: .NET Interop

This is an official request for a new forum entitled .NET Interop, ot just plain Interop. Consider your vast majority of forum users use, or have used VB 6 or prior and some are having troubles integrating their old components into .NET (I know I am).

I do see a growing number of COM Interop questions popping up, and this forum could cover C++ - .NET interop, Java - .NET interop, and COM interop.

Interop stands for interoperability, and tends to involve the integration of .NET to "outside" technologies and vice-versa.

Don't ya hate .NET? It ruined everything. Microsoft can't even get a decent program going to make things backwards compatible. They didn't even make VB6 backwards compatible with VB.NET. Same goes with the other languages.

[Edited] - dg

A more general idea would be "Interoperability" instead of ".NET interop" (as you said), I'm sure you don't want to limit it to just .NET.

Popeye Question: What is Interoperability? In normal english.

A very simple example would be if you wanted to use an ActiveX DLL in, say, a .NET application. Or a Java class library in your .NET app.

If you've ever referenced an office/word object, or a webbrowser object in VB.NET you may have noticed that a few AxInterop... dlls were created for it. These are the wrapper classes for the COM dll that you've referenced.

Interoperability: to me, is inter-process communications, between processes written in different languages.

This would also include interfacing to MS Office apps. These questions are fairly numerous in the .NET forum, and could probably make a forum on their own. RobDog already has a thread that could supply much of the FAQ for such a forum.

On the other hand, I suspect that the forum would not be heavily visited, so posting in there would receive less eyeballs than posting in the .NET forum would.

The Classic VB forum is the most popular. People post in there all sorts of questions, like say API questions, and I think they receive more replies there than they would do in the API forum. Perhaps not so specific replies though.

Therefore, you could conclude that posts in an Interop forum would receive responses from people who knew a lot of the topic, whereas the same post in the .NET forum would receive more, but general, responses.

How about starting a new forum on a trial basis first? Sure the moderators can do this and see if it work out or not?

Take for instance the .Net Framework forum. Really a topic that deserve's it's own forum, but there's only 2 post in there for don't know how long, so it can just as well be removed, making place for another temporary forum.

Just my 20 cents...

Did any decision get made on this Idea as I am trying to find out COM Interop info (VB.NET to MS Access) and dont really know which forum is the best to use.

Use the VB.NET forum.

Two comments --
First, people should refrain from making too much off topic noise in this forum. This is not chit chat (Jacob Roman, dglienna)


Secondly, and to to topic of this thread --

Interop is just one of a number of advanced topics. I am open to creating new forums; however, I think this is a case where this is just one of many possible advanced topics that we could add. I'd prefer to try to keep these in the regular forums for now (as suggested by others).

Brad!