About the Automation Interface
An Installer object must be created initially to load the automation support required to access the installer components through COM. This object provides wrappers to create the top-level objects and access their methods. These wrappers simply provide parameter translations to expose the installer functions in a manner consistent with Microsoft Visual Basic without changing the behavior of the methods.
Whenever possible, a pair of Get and Set C++ methods are exposed to Visual Basic as a single property. In some cases C++ methods taking an index argument are exposed as an indexed property. Many C++ methods return the result through a parameter because the return value is used for the error return. However, in Visual Basic, errors are handled by a separate mechanism, and the result is always passed in the return value.
For information about using automation and creating the Installer object, see Using the Automation Interface.
For reference material for the Windows Installer objects, see Automation Interface Reference.
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