COM, DCOM, MFC, ATL, OLE, ActiveX, WIN32..... aaaagh

Why oh why did I decide to script Windows media player.....

So to give you a background, as to why I am in Win32 hell, when I typically work in .Net, here it goes. There is this nifty feature in Vista called gadgets, it is essentially small javascript/html applcations (in osx widgets, yahoo konfabulator etc.) Anyways, I use WMP for my music, and all I wanted was to stop/start/pause/skip wmp gadget that would control an existing instance of windows media player.

Then it turned out that there is in fact no scriptable/automation object for WMP. There is a way to embed a new object, but that is not what i want. Which led to MSDN, and then I figured out that there are infact a couple of interfaces and classes that would let me do this, but it turned out they are not accessable from the .net framework, and had to done through c++.

Well C++, i had not touched in few years, but that was not the problem, the problem was that I found myself in a very different world to build applications on. So here I am trying to learn COM, MFC etc, and figure the hidden world of windows, well atleast for me. And I just ordered a few books on amazon to help me learn the guts of windows.