Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I popped over to bumr for a minute and came face to face with this Visual C++ code. Whoa! Work!
And yes, as noted in the comments, _bstr_t and _variant_t are darn handy. Almost make VC++ palatable at times. The problem with Microsoft’s Visual products isn’t that they aren’t powerful. The problem is you have to really dig to find the nifty helper functions to make your life easier.*
Users shouldn’t have to dig for information about how to use a product. This is equivalent to “if you have to ask directions, you can’t afford to use it” in attitude. Arrogant.
*Another problem is that going Microsoft’s way usually implies total buy-in to the MS way of doing things; I still own my soul, thank you very much.