How to create a manifest file for a TLB that is used only for remote COM objects?

Question

My Delphi application Client.exe needs a pair of .tlb files to work. These files define the server interfaces. Corresponding object instances are created using System.Win.ComObj.CreateRemoteComObject .

What is the problem?

Currently .tlb files .tlb registered globally during installation using regtlibv12.exe and are unregistered when uninstalling software. This makes it impossible to install and uninstall multiple instances of the same software, as it may violate TLB registration.

Trying to solve it using Free COM Registration

The idea is to use .tlb files without registration, but with a .manifest file. I know how to use a customized Windows application manifest file with Delphi . But I do not know how to extract information from .tlb files and create the correct .manifest file.

I found Mt.exe that can be used to generate .manifest files, but that does not help me, because

• it requests the appropriate DLL file if the -tlb parameter is -tlb , but there are no .dll files supplied with the application, since COM objects are created on remote computers

• it does not accept multiple .tlb files in the parameter list.

Other tools such as Make My Manifest or Without the participation of Make My Manifest are no longer available or do not help me.

What is the correct way to create a manifest file in this case?

Answer 1

AFAIK RegFree COM only supports registering local instances via dll . It is not possible to use it with DCOM, which is much more complicated than local COM.

From my own experiment, DCOM can be a real PITA, especially in terms of registration. IMHO you must either use local COM objects or switch to another standard approach, for example, to REST services. Perhaps you can reuse almost the same interfaces using, for example, the SOA approach to REST / JSON - see especially sicClientDriven mode for emulating DCOM objects.