Hey guys.

I've always actually wanted to get a better understanding of the difference between the above four technologies (ActiveX, COM, OLE and DLLs) but I've never really looked into it.

Can anyone distinguish these?

I mean, whenever I use AJAX (for old IE), I'm creating an ActiveX control for an XMLHTTPRequest object. The weird thing is, whenever I do any C++ work, I end up importing win32 functions and data types from various DLLs to let me access the win32 API. How is that different from creating ActiveX controls?

It all seems sort of similar.

Any clarification is much appreciated, as always

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A pawn can eventually become a queen...

Well, as with a lot of things in programming, I'd say they're kind of similar, but really way, way different

I've mostly worked with DLLs, and I don't know anything about OLE, so I wont pretend to be an expert of the subject, but I would say that the main thing that is common to all of the above things is that they import functions that you can use in your program. Other than that, the things you've mentioned are pretty different.

Hopefully someone more experienced than I can weigh in on the subject. In the meantime, I'd recommend looking up some articles on each of the subjects

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