December 07, 2005

COM Interop Support In Mono?

Jonathan Chambers Web Log: Something Real

I'm posting a screenshot of the COM Interop in mono doing something real. The mono runtime is launched through Visual Studio. It runs a simple C# program that creates an Excel application, displays it, and adds a workbook.

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[via a post from Miguel de Icaza]
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Obviously having the ability to run a COM-based application is a requirement if you are desirous to interop between a COM-based and .NET-based application(kind of hard to Interop with something you can't "Op"erate in the first place ;). While Wine provides the abilty to run COM-based Windows applications, the support is a bit shoddy. Well, at least the last time I tried using it, which to be fair wasn't exactly yesterday. So I could be completely off with this. I think I can safely state that a Wine-based application is, hmmm.. how should I say this... Fugly(if you have no idea what fugly is, its probably for the best)? ;)

Anyway, so unless I am missing something or am completely off target on my Wine/Shoddy comment(if I am, please let me know) this doesn't offer a whole lot to the Linux and Mac-based Mono users.

However...

I do wonder about the potential of this effort leading to support within Mono for Managed C++ which is what the Phalanger project(PHP compiler for the .NET platform) has stated to be the hold up in providing support for Mono:

Is it possible to use Phalanger under Mono?

No, it is currently not possible because some parts of Phalanger are mixed assemblies written in Managed C++, which is not supported in Mono. Although we are planning on rewriting these components to C++/CLI as we switch to FW 2.0, one of them - the Extension Manager - will always contain some native code. So it is likely that Phalanger will run under Mono in the future but without the Extension Manager. However, if Mono supports C++/CLI in the future we would probably port the Extension Manager to Mono.

I realize this is somewhat of a longshot given the fact that providing COM interop support has nothing to do with providing support for Managed C++. But with Mono/COM interop support on Windows you never know who might come along and suddenly take interest in working on such an effort given that Mono now plays nice with 10's of 1000's of COM-based Windows applications, many of which were either written in C++ or implement COM-based components that were written in C++.

Again, a long shot, but with these kinds of things you just never know. Providing COM Interop support isn't exactly going to hurt in finding interest for such things, so again, you really just never know ;)

Either way, you've got to applaud Jonathan Chambers for his efforts... VERY NICE!