[RESOLVED] Digging into COM from Class1 inside a standard VB6 EXE project.

[wqweto]

but not create directly from an exe file, am i right?

If you only have the filename of the .exe the first step would be to start it. When this .exe starts it has to register a class factory somewhere -- this is a *running* object with the single purpose of creating new instances of all the classes that are implemented in the .exe and it is these new instances that are called out-of-proc COM servers in the literature about COM.

The easiest way to register a class factory from a Std-EXE is to use file moniker with PutObject function as implemeted in this thread. The class factory needs to have a single method -- CreateInstance(ProgID As String) As Object with a big Select Case on the name of the class that's requested to be instantiated.

A client first calls the built-in GetObject("MyServer.ClassFactory") and then Set oObj = oFactory.CreateInstance("MyClass") to create instances of out-of-process COM servers that run in the Std-EXE process space.

What is my point? In this scenario you control both the .exe and the clients. The .exe has to be instrumented to register a class factory. It is not possible to take outlook.exe and to bolt a class factory registration code onto it unless Microsoft has already done that. If the .exe is produced by 3-rd party there is little you can do to instantiate instances of its private classes if the original author has not provided a class factory or another instantiation mechanism -- this is next to impossible and would be considered in the sphere of blackhat hacking.

cheers,
</wqw>