Binding Creation for user-imported COM libraries

[Piero512]

Hi

I was wondering how did you generated the bindings to all of Windows and such (I found out how later), and so I was wondering if there's a chance for a tutorial on how to take regular COM DLLs and generate a higher level binding through this package or a tool inside the win32 or the related pkg for this usecase

[timsneath]

Great question!

In this package, we import Windows metadata (.winmd) and generate Dart bindings from it. The metadata comes from Microsoft as part of this project: https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata.

This format was originally introduced for .NET libraries, and then expanded to support WinRT APIs. As a result, it's not commonly available for other COM libraries, unfortunately.

However, there is some good news. This package predates the availability of Windows metadata, so in the early days I had to generate COM bindings by scraping C header files. That code still exists; it's not robust, and I don't intend to support it. But if you have COM header files that match the style of the Windows ones, you can probably use it to generate a binding for your needs.

The code is here: https://github.com/timsneath/ffigen_com

You're welcome to fork or update it. Good luck!