Back in Win 95 and Win 98. Even Win 2000 we had OLE controls. That linked applications together. The best example was the Volume control. Open your media player, and Windows Volume. Adjust the Wave slider and the volume bar on the media player moved too. Or adjust the media player volume and the Wave slider magically moved. They were linked together.
I’m not sure when, but Microsoft stopped supporting it. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen object controls linked like that.
You can embed a Excel Spreadsheet into a Word Doc as a table. Update the spreadsheet. Save. Open the Doc and the embedded table is refreshed. But its not a dynamic link anymore. You can’t type data into Excel and see the word doc table change too.
So what happened? When did Microsoft kill OLE and Why?
The “simple” answer is that they didn’t; that stuff is just done with newer technologies. With sufficient handwaving, OLE, COM, ActiveX, .NET embedding, and WinRT are all the same basic technology, and it’s still extant and functional today, even in very modern apps.
Generally, though, the “update” timing (i.e. whether stuff appears live, or at predefined intervals, or only at load) is something negotiated between the control and the application embedding it, and not enough people use the “live” embedding to make it worth the extra cost (basically the “providing” application–or big chunks of it–needs to be kept alive and functional) in memory, CPU, and other resources. There’s no technological reason why you couldn’t implement live updating today; it’s just not done because there’s not enough demand.
ETA: I’m not sure the volume control was ever OLE based – I think it’s just a system setting that notifies of changes via the message pump.
I jut tried it and it works just fine.
I opened a word doc and an excel SS and pasted the SS into the doc.
Change the SS and the change is immediately reflected in the doc.
So what am I missing?
The linking may still work in Word then. I haven’t tried it in awhile. I thought you had to do a refresh for the Word table to update? I’ll have to try that on my dual monitor system at home.
It’s the volume control linking that was always so noticeable. I just tried adjusting the volume in VLC and GOM. The windows WAVE slider never moved. We used to play with it a lot on Win 98. It was new and kind of cool seeing the controls linked.
At least in Office 2007+, right click and you have different paste options (I am pretty sure 2003 and such have the same, just not graphical). By default it does a link, which changes with the Excel, but I can just as easily paste as a picture. I just did it with scatterplots.
Both VLC and GOM are “open source” applications. The term only states that you can obtain and modify the source code, but in practice it means that the applications are Linux applications, written and maintained by Linux users, and ported to Windows by Linux users who understand Windows poorly.
At best you get code written by people who THINK they know Windows. Often you don’t even get that. In either case, porting to Windows is normally done by using a generic library that emulates Linux on Windows. Since the portability libraries don’t support Windows-Only features, there is no way for the application programmers to implement them.
Not really. Open Source refers to a lot more than Linux; apart from all the other operating systems, even parts of Windows ( particularly those they just took ) are Open Source, and many Open Source software applications are Windows only.
Videolan, makers of VLC, started in 1996 in the Central School at Paris when Linux was very minor ( started 1991 ) and apart from being very professional designed the Windows client as a priority since there are more Windows users: they know as much about Windows as anyone outside, and prolly inside, Redmond.
Devolving a Linux application to Windows doesn’t necessarily involve degradation even if the operating system is inferior. Paradoxically Windows applications are often superior, and can be used on better systems such as Apple ( a form of Unix/BSD — both originals being Open Source ) or Linux.
[ Although, of course, the most sophisticated and complicated programs will be for Supercomputers, which don’t concern most of us, and are almost exclusively Linux, obviously enough. ]
At all events I prefer SMPlayer2 to VLC for any platform.
Ask Microsoft, or the manufacturer of the specific application you’re dealing with. In-process servers are generally much faster than executable-driven OLE servers, but are rare. For example, CorelDRAW starts up (and loads the entire program into memory) to serve an object. And, a new instance is started if Corel is already running, rather than simply calling the existing program to do the work.
