user2073381
user2073381

Reputation: 11

How can you add help to a .net Com Callable Wrapper?

We have a .net assembly that needs to also be consumed by a .net hostile but COM friendly language/development-environment. The .net assembly has method/property/class help embedded in it with the standard xml comments feature. What is needed is a way to propagate this help from the .net API to the user of the assembly's COM Callbable Wrapper, ... without any extra maintenance when updating the .net API.

This seems like an obvious thing to want to do, but unfortunately, the MS CCW generation doesn't generate help files or recognize any assembly attributes to specify help file links. Apparently tools like Sand Castle can generate a helpfile for an assembly from its intellisense comments, but the problem remains of how to link the CCW back to that help file.

I'm thinking that it might be logically possible by something like:

1) generate a type library from the assembly

2) convert the type library to IDL (how? OLEView seems to do it)

3) add the helpfile, helpcontext and helpstring attributes to the IDL file:

 a) how to extract the help context IDs from the Sand Castle generated help file?

 b) how to decide where these IDs belong in the IDL?

4) Recompile the TLB from the IDL

5) Regenerate the CCW using the TLB that references the help

Unfortunately tackling that process from scratch (especially a. and b.) would be more work than we would save vs. the creation and maintenance of a manually created environment specific wrapper around the CCW that includes manual copies of the .net help.

Does anyone have any ideas or know of any tools that already address this issue?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 113

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