JC Bell & Associates, Inc.

Bridging Visual Basic and C++ via COM

Background

Our client has an established, mature software product written in Visual Basic.

They found themselves needing to interface with third-party software interfaces written in C++.

These third-party interfaces perform supervisory control and monitoring of proprietary distributed systems.

Solution

We created C++ connection modules that present each third-party package's objects to Visual Basic using Microsoft's COM technology. Within Visual Basic, all objects are exposed through the Object Browser for easy inspection and manipulation. Explanations and detailed help text are tightly bound to the objects themselves.

Our connection layer modules are multi-threaded Win32 applications written in C++, making full use of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) to manage data.

---