Using the Blaise Component Pack in the .NET environment
Rob Groeneveld ; Statistics Netherlands, The Netherlands
The Blaise Component Pack (BCP) was designed and programmed as a series of COM (Component Object
Model) components. Now that the .NET environment has arrived, it is desirable to be able to use the BCP in the
new environment. At the outset, there is no major problem because there are tools in Visual Studio .NET which
enable us to work with COM objects as they are, so-called interoperability tools or Interop. These tools ensure
COM objects can be reached from the .NET environment. In essence, they put a wrapper around a COM object to
make it into an assembly. Assemblies are the building blocks of .NET applications.
The other way to use the BCP is to convert the components to .NET assemblies using the Type Library Import
program. It is shown how this is done and how the converted BCP assemblies can be used from the .NET
development environment. Some demos and examples shipped with Blaise 4.7 Enterprise are shown and run. All
of the .NET programming languages can use the BCP assemblies we created. In Blaise 4.7 Enterprise the
examples are in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6). We present examples in both VB.NET and C#. It is shown how
certain examples can be programmed more elegantly in the .NET environment because of the availability of new
methods, in particular the ToString method, the absence of which previously made a lot of extra programming in
VB6 necessary. The BCP.NET components and the examples in C# and VB.NET are available from the author.
| Contact: rgnd@cbs.nl |