[GD-Windows] Internet plugin

[Diogo de A. <dio...@ne...>]

Hi all!

 

I'm trying to build an Internet Explorer plug-in that displays what in
practice is a window to my game engine. I got this working using MFCs with
relative ease, but when I static link the MFCs (so that the user of the
plugin doesn't have to go fetch 10000 updates and installation packs), the
plugin size climbs to 6 Mbs, which I think it's too big (we all know what a
space hog MFCs are).

So I decided to try to build an ActiveX control from scratch and implement
what I needed from scratch (knowing ofc that it envolves a lot of work).

I built and registered an ActiveX control, that (for test purposes, since
documentation on this kind of approach seems to be limited to MFCs)
implemented IUnknown and IDispatch.

 

First problem I came to was that the registering of the control didn't make
it appear on the "Insert Control" list on the Active X Control Test
Container, where I was supposed to make my tests.

I solved that one by copying (again, for test purposes) the registry keys
generated by the MFC version of my plugin, changing what was needed to
reference my new control.

 

Then, the real problem started: when I use the Active X Control Test
Container and insert my control, the OCX I built gets called, my COM object
is created, it's interfaces are queried both for IUnknown and IDispatch, and
then (weirdly enough), it gets released (reference count goes to zero).
After that, the Active X Control Test Container crashes somewhere trying to
dispatch some message to some window that's set to NULL.

 

Honestly, I can think of a bazillion things that go wrong, but I really
don't know where to start. documentation on this kind of "manual" ActiveX
controls is almost non-existent (at least, I can't seem to find it
anywhere).

My first guess was that my dispatch interface was badly built, but the
IDispatch members aren't even called before the object is released, so it
shouldn't be that.

The fact that the Control Test Container is trying to access a NULL window
makes me guess that he's probably trying to access the window that my object
should have binded itself with or something, but again, I can't find no
information.

 

Anyone has any ideas on this? Even a small sample of a working internet
explorer plugin would help a lot!

 

Thanks in advance

Diogo de Andrade