AutoHotkey Community

Interestingly there are some free WinBatch extenders and dlls that might be used with AutoHotkey's DLLCall function.

One of the more interesting one is com.dll

http://www.tfic.com/download/comext.zip

Others can be found here- http://www.tfic.com/htm/dd383000.htm#WBExt013

Might be useful for studying.

I might be wrong as I didn't looked at the file, but such extenders/plugins are usually made to work only with the target program, offering a specialized API. So, unless somebody proves I am wrong, I fear this cannot be used within AHK.

_________________
vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

I had a look at the file's "readme". It looks like it might be possible to call the DLL with DllCall. The interface is presented simply as:

COMCall(method, pobj [,arg1 ...])

However, the exact way to call it via DllCall would have to be discovered, either by trial and error or contacting the author, etc. Maybe someone with an interest could look into this.

Thanks.

What is interesting is that perhaps this opens the possibility of a OLE/COM/ActiveX Dll for AutoHotkey. Like an AHKCOM.dll ...

That's the interface from the host program (WinBatch).
If you look at the export table (I just downloaded the file), you will see:
_WILExtender2
_WILExtender2@40
_WILExtenderQuery
_WILExtenderQuery@12
So obviously, as I feared, these are standardized function names for use of the application to extend. It probably call these functions to know which functions are defined in the DLL, etc.

Now, the .wbt files give examples of use, it may be of inspiration for a similar DLL.

_________________
vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

Thanks for checking into it. If anyone still has an interest in this, perhaps the author could be contacted in case the source code is available. If not, I'm pretty sure there are similar examples on the 'net about how to work with COM, and it's still on my to-do list to research it.

Currently, there are quite a few features that seem of higher priority than COM because they're closer to the central mission of AHK and thus of higher benefit. Some of them are:
1) Using SendInput to provide uninterruptible keystrokes, mouse clicks, and hotstrings. This could be a big improvement in macro reliability.
2) More GUI controls like TreeView and Status Bar.
3) Other GUI features like custom cursors.

Related article...

"A simple yet debuggable COM skeleton code"

http://www.codeproject.com/com/simplecomserver.asp

Interestingly, I was looking at the concept of an AHKCOM.dll and there are a number of examples of this method in other scripting/programming languages. Among those are Ruby and Python... both have source code that is interesting to look from the perspective of how they integrated com/ole/activex

http://www.python.org/windows/win32com/win32com_src.zip (Python win32com)

http://homepage1.nifty.com/markey/ruby/ ... -0.5.2.zip (Ruby win32ole)

Thanks for the links. I expect they'll make the R&D easier when the time comes.