SoC idea: write OLE32 and OLEAUT32 conformance tests

[Dan Kegel]

Yes, SoC is usually about coding new stuff rather than writing
conformance tests, but here's a situation where we badly need
more conformance tests *and* the tests are a real challenge to write.

Rob Sherman, who is one of the OLE code maintainers, remarked recently
that we could really use more test cases for part of COM/OLE:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-May/047401.html

Many apps have OLE problems; the query
http://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=err:ole&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW
finds 109 hits.  Maybe a third of these are really OLE problems that
could be repeated by conformance tests.  (I think
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4073
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4776
are good examples.)

Writing COM or OLE Automation tests in C is hard - the documentation
you need is in old books that are hard to find.  But it's doable given
a couple weeks.

There are a few links to writing COM in C at:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-April/046191.html
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/links/
http://members.tripod.com/IUnknwn/
And there are several old books (a few of which I have copies of) which are
also useful references.

This is probably a great project for someone who's really comfortable
with pointers and low level stuff.  Once the tests you write pass on Windows
and find bugs in Wine, the guys who write COM for Wine will fix the
bugs, I think.
- Dan

--
Wine for Windows ISVs: http://kegel.com/wine/isv