Bho

[suityou01]

I need to write a BHO for ClientCo to do some DOM tweaks for a project I am working on. I was minded to write the BHO in C++ but they have no C++ smarts in house and are rightly concerned about maintainability.

I note it is possible to write BHOs in C#. Is there any reason you would choose one language over another?

I would have thought C++ would have been the shout here as it would create a more lightweight dll, but if the performance trade off is negligable then what the hey, C# it is.

[NickFitz]

One caveat that I'm aware of is that a process can only load one version of the CLR. This means that if there is already a BHO installed on a machine, and that loads, say, CLR1.1, and your BHO needs CLR2.0, then your BHO is SOL

Alternatively, your BHO gets invited to the party first and loads CLR2.0, and then the other BHO dies

I'm not certain but I think I read somewhere that the order in which BHOs get initialised is not defined... meaning that sometimes one will crash, and sometimes the other one will. I think there's a good chance they'd take the browser down with them too

This is related to the matters discussed by Raymond Chen a while back, and in the thread he links to.

[NickFitz]

Oh, there's another MSDN thread discussing this very matter... some very helpful stuff in the comments.