COM (Microsoft’s Component Object Model) is AMAZING! It allows us to programatically connect to thousands of programs / objects. You can think of COM as a communication protocol. It allows you to “talk” to programs directly and reliably. Another way to think of it is this way: Think of a house as a DLL call. COM is like going to the front door and asking someone to do the work. When you use the DLL call, you are doing the work directly.
Here are some great resources for learning about COM and AutoHotkey.
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- Intro to COM & AutoHotkey webinar
- Tank, TABNation and Joe: Understanding COM, comparing to DLLs, and more
- Excel Function library & tutorials (dozens of functions leveraging COM)
- Great intro to COM by KON: MS Office COM Basics
- Jethrow: COM object reference on old forum
- Sinkfaze: COM object reference on new forum (and continued from above)
- Maul.esel: Advanced Raw COM interface
- Jeeswg: Tons of COM references
- Maul.esel: [AHK_L + AHK v2] COM Classes Framework (CCF)
- Live AHK Support with Tank & TABNation discussing the background of COM and AutoHotkey, how it differs to DLLs, and more
- Tank & Joe: History of COM and Future of Browser Automation
- RaptorX & Joe: Relationship between COM objects and DLLs
- Webservice API calls with AutoHotkey are done with a COM object
- Outlook is automated with a COM object and AutoHotkey
- IE has a COM object (but Edge does not )
- PowerPoint has a COM object
There are a ton of programs that have a COM Object built for them. Here are some I pulled together
- Access
- ADO (SQL queries to data sources)
- Adobe Acrobat Pro
- CAPICOM Series (digital signature, encryption etc.
- CuteFTP
- Dragon Naturally Speaking
- Email delivery via CDO
- Excel and my Excel page
- File System object
- Google Desktop
- HTML File (interact with HTML)
- ImageMagickObject
- Internet Explorer and my IE page
- Mappoint
- MSXML2 Dom Object (XML Parser)
- OneNote
- Outlook and my Outlook resources
- PowerPoint
- Publisher
- Scheduled Tasks
- SciTE
- Scripting Dictionary
- Shell.Application
- Speech API: SpVoice
- Synaptics touchpad
- Windows Explorer
- Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
- Windows Media Player
- WinHTTPRequest (API calls-Possibilities are endless!)
- WMI Tasks (Windows Management Instrumentation)
- Word
- XStandard.Zip