COM dll installation

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Hey folks,

We're working on an installer for a thumbnail extractor shell extension COM
server dll. I've been able to build a completely self-registering dll using
ATL (including the ShellEx entries for the file extension and custom Windows
Event Log settings for the server in HKLM). The dll installs OK from the
msi using the isolated approach, but we still have to run regsvr32 to peform
the actual registration. Is there a way from either the Visual Studio
deployment project side or by editing the .msi with Orca to get regsvr32 to
run during the actual installation? (Note: per the very few examples of how
to do these extensions, we're not generating or installing a type library
for this server, so those actions are out as a possible solution.)

Also, we're getting different vibes whether it's best to have the dll
completely self-installing, or if all of the registry entries should be
"externalized" in the msi. Is there a favored "best-practice" here? (One
wrinkle here is that the Event Log registration needs a couple of values
from the .h file produced by the message compiler when building the event
string templates. I've got an AddCommonRGSReplacements() override that adds
substitution strings to the .rgs so these values can be set based on the
generated .h symbols at runtime. If we "externalize" these symbols, I
presume they'd have to have hardwired settings, which presents its own
maintenance pitfall if the .mc message source file is changed.)

Thanks



.

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