08.10.98

A CASE Tool for COM Development

Posted in Articles at 12:14 pm by kkj

Warning! Faded content and outdated technologies ahead …

Following my Master’s thesis on Component Models I attended the Eighth Nordic Workshop on Programming Environment Research (NWPER’98) in Rønneby, Sweden. The workshop was supposed to have been held in Bergen, Norway, but was moved due to a massive strike amongst airplane personnel. In any case my thesis-partner, Peter Jeggesen and I gave a presentation on our work with component technologies, in particular Microsoft’s COM for which we had made a round-trip engineering tool. The tool allowed you to model your components via a UML-like notation, generate stubs and skeletons and reimport the meta model for further refinement. Code could be generated for a number of languages, including Delphi, C++, and MS Visual Basic.

Model Driven Architectures, retro style, anyone?

Check out the online version, published also in the Nordic Journal of Computing, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1999. A set of reports, some of which were used as basis for the article by The Centre for Object Technology, present research done on Component Based Software Development (CBSD). My Master’s Thesis and the source code for the CASE tool is also available from here.

Abstract

This article presents a generic graphical tool-kit for developing Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) software components. A method for generating code for arbitrary languages is presented, along with a description of how the tool could be integrated with third party applications. A short review of a concrete implementation concludes the paper.

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