Interop

Extending the Lokad DSL tool

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Photo by Al_HikesAZ (CC license)

What, where, why

I need to fast forward past several planned blog topics to establish a context for this one:

  • I'm working on a legacy VB6 app that is about to get some ddd, messaging love in the process of moving off the VB6 platform.
  • I've landed on using the Lokad DSL tool (Github) for defining messages.

The Lokad dsl tool does what it says on the box: It lets you define immutable, datacontract serializeable, message classes. But without all the mind numbing typing normally required to write out such classes in C#.

DSL code:

AddSecurityPassword?(SecurityId id, string displayName, string login, string password)

Becomes c# code:

[DataContract(Namespace = "Sample")]
public partial class AddSecurityPassword : ICommand<SecurityId>
{
    [DataMember(Order = 1)] public SecurityId Id { get; private set; }
    [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string DisplayName { get; private set; }
    [DataMember(Order = 3)] public string Login { get; private set; }
    [DataMember(Order = 4)] public string Password { get; private set; }
 
    AddSecurityPassword () {}
    public AddSecurityPassword (SecurityId id, string displayName, string login, string password)
    {
        Id = id;
        DisplayName = displayName;
        Login = login;
        Password = password;
    }
}

But I needed more

There is another branch of c# coding that requires a lot of typing:
COM interop code.

Categories: 

Registration Free COM Interop Deployment

Today I ran two rounds of deployment of to our production servers. This led me to start pondering a blog post on the strategy we've chosen to make this as painless as possible.

Our operational requirements demands that deployment of new versions is done continuously, without downtime, while our users are actively using the software.
As long as the deployment environment is controlled, .net applications can be xcopied directly, with no extra steps. But our application is a mix of .net and legacy VB6 components. This mix would lead many to believe that registration in the registry is unavoidable, which could lead to DLL hell.

But there is a solution:

Categories: 

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