Question

I’m writing a class-library (IE BHO) in C# and currently wrangling with the large volume of what I think is junk output coming from REGASM’s generated registry keys.

The short version is this: I only want to expose a handful of classes (currently: ONE class) to IE (and the rest of COM). Only one class has the ClassInterfaceAttribute and GUID stuff set, and I can test that the add-on only requires the COM registry keys for this class — and yet, REGASM generates GUIDs and registry keys for every class in the entire project.

This is annoying and somewhat disturbing as I do not want my class names sitting in users’ registry unless they absolutely have to be there.

To be fair, many of those other classes are marked public because I use them in a driver app from another project in the same solution, to work around IE’s debugging black hole…

I’m still very green to COM in general (especially relating to .Net) and I was wondering what is the best way to hide all my other classes from regasm? Or, at least, why these classes that — even though they are marked public — are showing up when I haven’t set any of the COM flags for them?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Use internal access modifier for stuff that doesn’t need to have public modifier. For stuff that really needs public access use ComVisible attribute to partially hide it.

For example:

[ComVisible(false)]
public class ClassToHide {
    //whatever
};

public class ClassToExpose {

     public void MethodToExpose() {}

     [ComVisible(false)]
     public void MethodToHide() {}
};

All public member functions and member variables of all public classes are COM-visible by default. So first think of making them internal and if you really need them public hide them from COM with ComVisible.