About creating COM add-ins
COM add-ins are a feature of Microsoft Office supported by MapPoint. COM add-ins allow you to add your own functionality to MapPoint or other Office programs. The key benefits of using COM add-ins include:
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COM add-ins run in-process with MapPoint, so they generally run faster than COM applications do as stand-alone executables.
The basic COM add-in architecture is consistent across all Office programs, so you can use your knowledge of one to work with any program, even when creating a single add-in that works with more than one Office program.
COM add-ins are standard COM and can be written in Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual C++, or any other COM-compliant development environment.
A COM add-in is an in-process COM server—an ActiveX DLL—that implements the IDTExtensibility2 interface.
Notes
Non-modal forms cannot be displayed in MapPoint directly from a COM add-in. If you have non-modal forms, you can have your add-in call an external program (such as a Visual Basic executable) that connects to MapPoint.
The lifetime of a COM add-in is different when loaded by the MapPoint Control than when loaded by MapPoint. A COM add-in loaded by the MapPoint Control is loaded every time a map is loaded and closed every time a map is closed.
More information
Create COM add-ins in Visual Basic