Posts tagged Software

I’ve seen a lot of programmers lately that write COM as one of the things they are experts at, but, once you actually put them to the test, they turn out to know the bare minimum of what COM is and how to use it, and why is this? most of them turn out to be Visual Studio programmers, not actually C/C++/C#, etc programmers.

By Visual Studio programmers i mean, those who can only code with VS, take them out of the environment and they are completely lost, ask them to create a windows application without the application wizards and it’s a no go.

Of course most of the people would say, it doesn’t matter, what are the chances that you end up having to work without VS?, yeah i know, if you know where to look for work, you will never find yourself under those circumstances, but how sad that is for anyone who sells himself as a true professional?

Anyway, i had a rather funny situation in which i wrote a c# com object and loaded it from c++, one of the programmers was very impressed, because as far as he knew, you could use c++ from inside a c# application, but not the other way around, so i explained that the c# object was a COM object so there was no problem loading it from c++, but he could not really get it, and why? because funnily enough, he thinks COM is a c-only technology, well now he knows better, but wait, why was this guy hired in the first place? as a windows programmer, to lead the development of a windows application that uses COM as one of the principal technologies with an Office add-on and IE plug-ins and a lot of COM related programming, but he doesn’t really understand anything that is happening, VS does all the heavy work.

So i though about it and decided to write a very simple IE plug-in using the Visual C++ Express edition as with all the code on this site,  by reading the code of this plug-in you will be able to see how a COM object actually works without wizard generated code or anything else but what you will find on the source files of our project.

When i say, COM without MFC/ATL, what i mean is, most of the people i know that use COM think it is somehow heavily related to using MFC or ATL, when in fact it is not, there are even those who for some reason believe COM == OLE, how can this happen, for one i think Microsoft’s documentation about COM is very hard to understand for beginners, and second, by using tools like VS most of the knowledge developers could get is taken away from them by the wizards that write all the code and just leave the developer to fill in the methods, which leads to developers who depend on the generated code since they just know that by filling those methods things will work out ok, without having to understand how or why.

So, for those who really want to learn the how and why, I’ll be posting a simple tutorial on the very basics of COM, and i mean really very basics, starting from how a class is made and virtual tables and pointers to methods, interfaces, etc.

Now i would like to ask all windows programmers out there, how much do you really think a software developer needs to understand about windows technologies to describe that person as an “expert” ?