The Component Categories Manager

To facilitate the handling of component categories and to guarantee consistency of the registry, the system provides the Component Categories Manager, a COM object with a CLSID of CLSID_StdComponentCategoriesMgr. This COM object provides the following interfaces:

ICatInformation provides methods for obtaining information about the categories implemented or required by a certain class and provides information about the categories registered on a given machine.

ICatRegister provides methods for registering and unregistering component category information in the registry. This includes both the human-readable names of categories and the categories implemented or required by a given component or class.

Associating Icons with a Category

Categorizing by Component Capabilities

Categorizing by Container Capabilities

Default Classes and Associations

Defining Component Categories