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Browsing and exploring COM, ActiveX and OLE objects

Tue, 2012.07.24 - 18:43 — müzso
http://www.quepublishing.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1667487&seqNum=7
The article points out that you've the following options (possibly among others) to browse and explore all the COM/OLE/ActiveX objects installed on your computer ...

  • Registry editor: take a look at all the entries in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry hive. You'll find there the most basic ActiveX scripting classes (eg. Scripting.FileSystemObject) as well.
  • The Object Browser that is part eg. the Visual Basic Editor bundled with Microsoft Office applications. If you don't find it at the location the article specified ("Tools->Macro->Visual Basic Editor->View->Object Browser), chances are you use a more recent version of Office. Eg. in the 2007 edition you've to enable the developer tab first.
    To populate the listing of the Object Browser, you've to first add/enable the various references in Visual Basic Editor in Tools->References. Note that some of the entries here are most probably invalid and will trigger an error. So do not just blindly start checking all checkboxes, because in the end pressing OK will trigger an error and all list elements after the erroneous one will remain unchecked. Smile Furthermore ... VBE won't store the list of selected references. So before you go and try to select all of them, don't. If you restart your Office app, the reference selections will revert to the default list.
  • OLE/COM Object Viewer (Oleview.exe) that comes as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools bundle. This one is a bit difficult to use and doesn't show all available objects. Eg. you'll not be able to find Scripting.FileSystemObject here. Whereas Object Browser in Office can show it (if you enable the right reference).
  • ActiveXHelper is pretty old (just like OLE/COM Object Viewer), but still works pretty well. However it'll not give you much detail on the ActiveX objects ... apart from their name, path (to the OCX/DLL), version, etc. But it doesn't analyze the available objects, functions, etc.
After trying all three approaches, I think the Object Browser (of Office) is the least painful (or most helpful ... whichever phrasing you like Smile ).