I thought I'd post an update on where Rob and I are up to, and where we're going. This is the plan that I have in my head, Rob may want to do things in a slightly different order etc so don't be surprised if we change some stuff around as a result of this email.
We're currently reworking, extending and in some cases rewriting the code Marcus wrote originally to work more like native DCOM does. This means that new features and major improvements are *not* going to happen for a while, because before we can extend our support for DCOM we have to migrate to the same architecture that Microsoft use internally. This has several benefits:
1) It saves us design work, because MS already did it 2) It's the only way to be wire compatible in the long run 3) It means the documentation (like Essential COM etc) is already written
Getting to a more native-style architecture has already been started, but won't be finished for a while. Here are the steps we need to take, the ones marked with a * are already done, - means they are still to do.
- Replace the wine_marshal_id structure with [STD]OBJREF. This is necessary because the Microsoft internal interfaces like IOXIDResolver and IRemoteActivation operate in terms of OBJREFs. An OBJREF is a marshalled interface pointer, so by using the same structure we're able to be wire-compatible with MS.
* Switch apartments to be identified by OXIDs * Refactor and extend the stub manager, identified by OIDs * Refactor and extend the proxy manager - Make all system interface proxies support aggregation - Identify interface stubs by IPID not IID - Do a search and replace of wine_marshal_id with STDOBJREF
- Alexandre has stated that he won't allow any more midl generated code in WineHQ. Enhance widl until it can generate raw RPC marshallers for at least IRemUnknown.
- Generate unique names for the pipes we currently use in communication and pull the right name from the OBJREF DUALSTRINGARRAY. In real DCOM this contains the RPC string binding for the OXID Resolver endpoint. This should be the first enhanced feature, as at this point you can run two apps at once that happen to marshal the same interface, and they won't interfere.
- Implement IRemUnknown, using custom marshalling for now. Use this to nail distributed refcounting, at the moment we have a bunch of bad hacks for that.
- Flip DCOM on top of the RPC transport layer, replacing the current named pipe based IRpcChannelBuffer implementation. Not necessarily using NDR marshalling at this point, though we may find it's necessary (?)
- Rework RPC dispatch to be more Windows-like, so call re-entrancy works.
- Implement RPC thread affinity. This will fix the InstallShield painting problems ... yes it's a long way off :(
- Begin rewriting/moving the typelib marshaller to rpcrt4 and to use NDR (in Windows this is done by generating MOPs at runtime from the type data)
.... this point is so far off I don't really care about it ....
I probably forgot some items as well. But as you can see we only just begun. Also remember that Rob may want to modify it and also we may change direction at any point to make stuff we want internally work (like native MSIv2 ...)
thanks -mike
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Mike Hearn