I've been working on COM and Automation with a new project. Essentially I have a database server which receives information from several different communication components, processes the information against the Database, and returns ACK to the communication server. I have one communication server written in VC++ and another written in VFP. Both work, both allow communication between components BUT...

I start the application up by initiating the communication service. It creates an instance of the VFP database server and registers with the database server. At registration, the database server knows what communication server is instantiating it and executes a GETOBJECT() call to get a reference to the communication service. Since the communication service is already running, I do not want to create a new instance of it, I simply want to get a reference to the running object. Here's the problem. If the running communication server is the one written in VC++ the syntax used for GETOBJECT() is:

oComServer = GETOBJECT(,lcAppName)

where the syntax used if the communication server is a VFP app is:

oComServer = GETOBJECT("", lcAppName)

If I use the second syntax with a VC++ app it creates another instance of the communication server. If I use the first syntax with the VFP communication server it gives me an OLE error.

This stuff is not terribly well documented. Any ideas?

Rick Grinter