COM in the Windows Installer World - Type Libraries
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In the context of type libraries, it’s interesting to take a look at the Registry table with Orca (see Figure 3-4).
Figure 3-4. The Registry table
The table itself is straightforward: Each entry has a Root to identify the Registry hive, the name of a Registry key, then Name and Value pairs for the contents of the key. The Name column has some values that determine how to create the data (such as +, meaning create the key if it’s absent), as well as actual data names. Notice that this table contains some of the COM registration entries that don’t have entries in the Class, TypeLib, or ProgId tables. For example, the COM ThreadingModel value is stored in this table. Now if you’re familiar with COM registration entries, you probably know that type library registration creates Interface entries in the Registry, so you might wonder why there are entries for COM interfaces here in the Registry table when the type library registration will create them. In fact, you can delete these Interface entries from the Registry table using Orca and install the edited package, and those HKCRInterface entries are indeed still created. The probable explanation is that this is simply a consequence of a VS mechanism that collects all the registration entries without any attempt to filter them, and any that don’t fit into the COM tables are put in the Registry table. There is no harm in having the explicit Interface entries installed from the Registry table as well as through type library registration from the TypeLib table.
If you have a stand-alone type library as a TLB file that you want to install and register, VS will do that for you. If you add the file to the project, you’ll see that VS automatically sets the Register property of the file to vsdrfCOM. If you build the package and look at the Registry table with Orca you’ll see that all the appropriate Interface entries have been extracted.
 This chapter is from The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer by Phil Wilson. (Apress, 2004, ISBN: 1590592972 ). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.
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