RE: [ctypes-users] Re: How to use COM server that doesn't support IDispatch?

[Peter H. <pe...@en...>]

Bill Bell wrote:
> As many have said already, it's beautiful stuff. IMO, lots of 
> things become feasible (ie, doable within reasonable time 
> frames) using ctypes. We just seem to need more examples and 
> discoveries etc to speed our work.

Definitely!  I'd say that there are those who know COM inside
out who are probably having great success with ctypes, and
there are those of us who still don't know the difference
between an IDispatch interface and an "OLE Automation" who
are just sort of trying to scrabble something together on
sheer guts. :-)

I have a few things I want to put into the wiki (e.g. a recipe
on downloading, installing, and using the MIDL compiler to
build basic type libraries, which took me ages to sort out)
and I plan to release the code I'm writing very shortly,
when it works, in a few days hopefully.  The customer has
not disagreed with the idea of this being under an MIT license...

I'll happily mail what I have now to anyone who wants it, but
I strongly suggest waiting because (a) it's not finished, and
(b) I couldn't possibly respond to questions about it in the
next few days.  (I'll say if you're under the gun, and desperate,
I'm happy to share.  Otherwise please wait a week. Open 
invitation to anyone listening. :-)

> That parallels my experiences as far as working with dual 
> interfaces and/or vtables with pythoncom is concerned--and 
> doubtless you're a helluva lot better programmer than I am. 
> Success always seemed to be just "a few more days work" 
> outside my grasp.

I still think I could get it working with win32com, as it
claims to support vtables, but unfortunately I was stumped
on type libraries for quite a while, and didn't sort it out
until switching to ctypes (because that didn't work at first
either and pointed me forcefully at the problem), but I
haven't got time to go back and try it out again right now.

> > Is this anything related to what you're talking about?
> 
> It sounds like it. Snippets of your code could probably "feed 
> a family of five."

<blush> :-)

-Peter