COM Migration

[Keith D. Zimmerman]

Greetings,

I am a team lead on a medium sized C++ project. We have roughly 400k c++
lines of code, and our project is ongoing - it was first released in 1997 and
will continue to be used for the foreseeable future...

That being said, my question is how best to migrate our COM code to a .NET
environment. We have defined several COM interfaces (which are used heavily)
and have need of defining several more for our next release. But we are not
sure if we ought to migrate our stuff to .NET

We use the microsoft script control ocx to run jscript code inside our
project. This enables customizations to be added on. Many of our
installations are running these customizations, and it is primarily for these
that the COM libraries are used. The COM libraries are essentially wrappers
around our applications main code.

Does anybody have any experience with this type of migration? Is .NET the
best way to provide add-on ability? Or ought we to stick with the COM
interfaces for the foreseeable future?

Thanks,
-kz

[Ira Baxter]

"Keith D. Zimmerman" <Keith D. Zi*******@discu ssions.microsof t.com> wrote in
message news:29******** *************** ***********@mic rosoft.com...

I am a team lead on a medium sized C++ project. We have roughly 400k c++
lines of code, and our project is ongoing - it was first released in 1997 and will continue to be used for the foreseeable future...

That being said, my question is how best to migrate our COM code to a .NET
environment. We have defined several COM interfaces (which are used heavily) and have need of defining several more for our next release. But we are not sure if we ought to migrate our stuff to .NET

We use the microsoft script control ocx to run jscript code inside our
project. This enables customizations to be added on. Many of our
installations are running these customizations, and it is primarily for these that the COM libraries are used. The COM libraries are essentially wrappers around our applications main code.

Does anybody have any experience with this type of migration? Is .NET the
best way to provide add-on ability? Or ought we to stick with the COM
interfaces for the foreseeable future?

Hi. I think you have two questions:

a) Should you convert?
b) How can you do it?

"Should you convert" is a business question, likely driven by your
customer's
perception of what you are offering and how badly they want to be "modern".
I can't help you with that decision :-{

However, should you decide to convert... that's a lotta code to switch over.
We build custom automated migration tools, and we have looked pretty
hard at C++-based COM component conversion to .NET.
We have done other C++ migrations across platforms.

Our conversion tools have language modules for a most varieties
of C++ dialects including all the MS dialects (up to an including
those in MS Studio 2005) and corresponding C# dialects.
We also have JavaScript (essentially JScript) front ends.

Contact me for more details.

--
Ira D. Baxter, Ph.D., CTO 512-250-1018
Semantic Designs, Inc. www.semdesigns.com