"Sven Pran" <no.direct@mail.please> wrote:
[color=blue]
>I have an appcation that includes a dll I have written and which is of
>interest to other application makers.
>
>One of them has written an MS Access database application using VBA, he
>wants to use my dll and approached me telling me that he could not
>"register" this dll so he could not call it from his application.
>
>I do not know anything about registering dll modules, my installation
>program (INNO) simply installs them to the windows\system folder and that's
>it. (I have wondered whether to install to \system or to \system32, but as
>long as \system works I'm happy about using that)[/color]

Not all DLLs need to be registered. "Extension" DLLs contain a
collection of functions that are made available to other programs to
be used. This type of DLL usually comes with a header file and
documentation describing the interfaces to all the member functions.
When the application calls for the library to be loaded, the OS looks
for it in a specific set of places (current directory, \Windows,
\Windows\System32, etc).

Active X DLLs (or COM DLLs), on the other hand, have two (IIRC)
well-defined functions that calling programs use to find out what
other functions are available within the library, and what the calling
sequence for each function is. These libraries need to be registered,
because calling programs will look them up by name in the registry,
and find their exact address there.

People in programming groups (microsoft.public.vc.*) would probably
know this subject in much greater detail than the folks that hang out
here.

--
Tim Slattery
MS MVP(Shell/User)
[email]Slattery_T@bls.gov[/email]
[url]http://members.cox.net/slatteryt[/url]