COM tracing ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi guys,

	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):

	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-diagnostic-tracing
		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 !

	Crazily - might it be possible to instrument, interpose and use Wine's
COM impl. on Windows [ which sounds a bit 'exciting' ;-], or ?

	Anyhow - help much appreciated & sorry for the noise !

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot