How does COM registration work in Windows

Posted by Air Benji on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Air Benji
Published on 2008-10-17T08:41:55Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 16:13 UTC
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I'm an application packager trying to make sense of how the COM registry keys (SelfReg) interrelate to the given .dll in Windows.

ProgID's, AppID's, TypeLibs, Extensions & Verbs are all tied around the CLSID right? Do CLSID's always use Prog/App IDs or could you just have a file extension class? Which bits are optional?

Some of it seems to be 'like a router' where there's the two interfaces (internal - .dll) and external (the extension etc).

How does this all fit? (The SDK documentation doesn't make sense to me)

I ask as this is all pivotal to application 'healing' with Windows Installer (which packagers are all 'big' on, but there's no nitty-gritty breakdowns since its a coder-thing really)

---Edit: Am I safe in assuming that for what COM is registered, it must all link back to the CLSID and cannot be a 'dead-end'? Verbs need extensions which need progid's...

What about the AppId's, TypeLibs and Interfaces? How do they interrelate?

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