Thanks for the reply Sam.

You know, I've just realized how ridiculously simple it is to do this with a dll in c. In my present project I'm using a dll I wrote to compress and decompress files. All I need to do is export one more function:

int _stdcall return_value(unsigned char* buff_ptr) {

return *(buff_ptr)

}

Of course, this will return the value one byte at a time; a few more lines of code and another parameter to indicate the data size would generalize it.

This is kind of absurd. It greatly upsets my aesthetic sensibilities. It's like a great big ugly festering sore on the butt of Visual Basic, a language and environment that otherwise has a great deal of beauty.

To me, the best of all worlds would be if Visual C++ included an optional VB type IDE that gave you the same kind of event-driven programming while using C/C++ for the actual language that was used. I see no reason whatsoever why this could not be done.