Some time ago I had to write an add-in program for an application we use call ArcGIS. The program involved searching a property gazetteer and then sending the co-ordinates for a selected property to the main program so that property could be zoomed in on.

ArcGIS natively supports DDE for this sort of thing. I had never written any program that could communicate with another program before, but I found DDE very easy to learn and implement. It also did it's job very well - i.e. send a string on data between programs. A replacement version of our program is planned which will be written in VB.NET. Seeing as .NET doesn't support DDE, I would like to know what I should use in it's place. I suspect it'll be either COM, COM+ or DCOM or something else?? I can't find any helpful info in the net about how to use these. Most of the stuff is very technical and seems to be geared to stuff way beyond the simple exchange of a string of text. However, I still need to be able to send this string of text from the new program and am hopeful someone can point me the direction of a tutorial for something that will do this.

Cheers,
Mark

Although I have not working with this myself, I think what you need to look into is .NET Remoting. This is the .NET version of DDE to some extent. COM/COM+/DCOM are not .NET, they are COM (and variations).

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

Hi there,

Hope my post saves you time if you are trying to automate ArcView 3.x from .NET (C#) code via passing Avenue commands through DDE:

In English [translated by Google]: read article

In Russian [orginal]: Управление ArcView 3.2 с помощью Avenue комманд из .NET (C#) кода по протоколу DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange)

Good luck!