Early Binding of a C# COM library in VBA

Question

Although this is a long question the coding and testing part should be really easy to reproduce.

I have created two separate Class Libraries<

Answer 1

Do avoid focusing on the ProgId. You are not actually using it, the dialogs that you made a screenshot of show the actual class names, not the ProgId.

Getting the class name renamed to "Test_Connection" is normal behavior for the type library exporter. It will do so whenever it detects a conflict with another interface or class name that has the same name. You are certainly increasing the likelihood of this happening by also having a dependency on ADODB, it also has a Connection class. A very trivial solution is to simply rename your own type.

Your code snippet cannot reproduce this problem. But of course it is incomplete, we can't see what you are really doing in the code. You'll bring in the dependency on ADODB if any of your public methods use a type from this type library. Also note that there are non-zero odds that this will happen by accident. You might have written a method that intended to use your own Connection type but the compiler resolved it to the ADODB type.

An essential tool to debug this is Oleview.exe, run it from the Visual Studio Command Prompt. First create the type library for your C# assembly with Tlbexp.exe. Then use File + View Typelib, you'll see the content of your type library expressed in the IDL syntax. You'll have little trouble recognizing the mapping of your C# types to the IDL declarations.

Pay attention to the importlib directives at the top of the file. They should look like this:

// TLib :     // TLib : mscorlib.dll : {BED7F4EA-1A96-11D2-8F08-00A0C9A6186D}
importlib("mscorlib.tlb");
// TLib : OLE Automation : {00020430-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
importlib("stdole2.tlb");

There should only be those two. The first one imports the .NET types, defining _Object. The second one imports standard COM types, like IDispatch. If you see additional ones here then you increase the odds of a name collision.

This IDL also gives you a way to solve the problem, in case it is unsolvable, you can edit it to name the types the way you want them. Save it to a .idl file. And compile it with midl.exe /tlb to generate a type library with your preferred names. Do note that this is not something you want to have to do often.