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I have a COM DLL written in Visual C++. I fully control that COM DLL code. Of course it can be consumed from both managed and unmanaged applications. I want to insert a very specific check that should only be run when the COM DLL is consumed by a .NET application.

Is there some programmatic way for my COM object to detect whether it is being consumed from a .NET application or from an unmanaged application?

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  • @sharptooth I have no idea if it's possible, but I'd love to know why you want to? Commented May 17, 2011 at 12:24
  • @aphoria: We want to insert an extra check that is only needed when it is used from a .NET application and would hurt otherwise. Commented May 17, 2011 at 12:27
  • It does seem like a rather odd question. Maybe you could check if mscoree.dll is loaded, though I'm not sure how reliable of an indicator that is. See stackoverflow.com/questions/2080046/… for example (I like wj32's answer). Commented May 17, 2011 at 12:40
  • @sharptooth: Can you be more specific about that check? Normally, the called COM object shouldn't care what technology is used to implement the caller. Commented May 17, 2011 at 12:44
  • @Daniel Hilgarth: What I want to check is not that critical - I just want to write an if-statement and don't know which condition to check. Commented May 17, 2011 at 12:46

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These kind of "what's my environment" questions always have the same answer. Your host has no trouble figuring out if it is managed, just add a property to your interface to let it tell you. A trivial solution compared with the alternative. Which is impossible to implement reliably in COM, lots of ways to host a server.

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+1 This is a very good point. It's tempting to over-engineer a cool, slick solution when a simple one would work. (Something I struggle with.) This doesn't technically answer the question, but maybe it's not possible and this is the best solution.
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Two possibilities:

  1. Create a native .NET assembly wrapping the COM object and initializing it appropriately
  2. Try to detect whether your process is a .NET process and live with the problems (no mono detection, false positives, most likely invalid detection when used in the context of DCOM/COM+)
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