30 Mar
2017
30 Mar
'17
8:16 p.m.
Hello,
On 03/30/2017 04:58 PM, Michael Meeks wrote:
Rather a peripheral question; apologies for that -
but I'd imagine
there are experts here that may be able to help.
I have a black-box problem - a Windows app dealing with confidential
data that I can't easily touch (and thus can't get to run under Wine) -
which does some small but critical automation of MS Office - using VBS /
COM scripting.
I'd -really- love some input on how best to trace that series of COM
method calls on Windows itself ie. the (remote) service activation, and
the RPC beyond that - particularly the method names, parameters etc. of
the COM/OLE Office API. I've tried (so far):
don't you have at least a tlb
file for the culprit COM stuff? You can
look at that with oleview; Wine implements one too should you be on Linux.
http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor
which, while closed, looks interesting; but traces a lot
in a hard-to-search way and doesn't appear to do the
trick.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/926098/how-to-enable-com-and-com-d…
Sounds useful: using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) but
has this rather unhelpful property:
"The binary file must be formatted by Microsoft
so that it can be analyzed. Please forward the
.etl files to your support contact. ..." ;-)
Component models used to be all the rage in my youth ;-) surely someone
solved the "strace for COM calls" problem elegantly some-when !
Well Wine
has that built in for the stuff it implements. For the rest we
write tests that exercises the respective API.
Crazily - might it be possible to instrument,
interpose and use Wine's
COM impl. on Windows [ which sounds a bit 'exciting' ;-], or ?
You
don't need Wine for that. You can write wrappers around the COM
classes you need, easily if you have the info from the TLB.
Anyhow - help much appreciated & sorry for the
noise !
bye
michael