Phillip Schmitz wrote:
I've been lurking for a while now with a view to starting work on wine - specifically COM and DCOM. I know some people have started some work and there might be some patent issues with COM at least - so maybe DCOM is a better bet (I had the possibly naive idea of implementing COM via DCOM - it would be almost transparent, slower but less "dangerous").
I doubt that DCOM has fewer patent issues than COM. By the way, here's a good 'executive summary' of com/dcom: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/com_body.html And here's the official spec (yes, there is one!): http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009899899/ The above document is actually the "ActiveX" spec, so it covers more than just COM, but that's probably good. I don't know how good it is as an implementor's guide, but it looks promising.
Also, what do people use in terms of test-suites? custom win32 apps? free/shareware? While I have quite a few larger apps like Office etc I imagine it's better to try smaller, more specific apps at first. I want to do comparisons and communication with Win95/8 in VMWare and don't really want to _purchase more Win32 apps_ for testing!
Good question. There *is* a COM conformance test suite; see http://www.microsoft.com/msj/1298/ntUnix/ntUnixtop.htm I doubt that Microsoft would let Wine developers use it, though. On the other hand, the Open Group sells COM/DCOM implementations packaged with the interoperability test suite at a "nominal fee"; see http://www.opengroup.org/comsource/datasheet.htm They have released things like Motif as open source in the past... I wonder if they'd be willing to contribute their DCOM or the test suite? That would rock. Anyone know anyone who works at the Open Group? :-) - Dan -- "I have seen the future, and it licks itself clean." -- Bucky Katt