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Development RCW Reference Counting Rules != COM Reference Counting Rules

Avoiding COM object leaks in managed applications that make use of COM Interop can be a daunting task. While diligent tracking of COM object references and appropriate usage of Marshal.ReleaseComObject usually works fine, COM Interop is always good for surprises. Recently having been tracking down a COM object leak in a COM/.Net-Interop-centric application, I noticed that the CLR did not quite manage the reference count on my COM object as I expected it to do – more precisely, it incremented the referece count of a COM object when it was passed (from COM) as a method parameter to a callback implemented in . Continue »

Development Working Around TlbImp's Cleverness

TlbImp, the .Net tool to create Interop assemblies from COM type libraries, contains an optimization that presumably aims at making the consumption of the Interop assembly easier, but ultimately is a nuisance. Consider the following IDL code: import "oaidl.idl"; import "ocidl.idl"; [ uuid( a657ef35-fea1-40ad-86d8-bb7b6085a0a3 ), version( 1.0 ) ] library Test { [ object, uuid( 84b2f017-b8fe-4c2c-87b8-0587b4bf5507 ), version( 1.0 ), oleautomation ] interface IFoo : IUnknown { HRESULT Foo(); } [ object, uuid( 13d950d6-beb3-4dd3-957b-88b0e5eb5e3f ), version( 1. Continue »