sham

What is difference between Activex DLL and Activex EXE ?

Rory

They are both forms of ActiveX COM components (application and type libraries that conform to the COM 1 specification). The main difference is a DLL is in-process, meaning it runs within the callee/client process sequentially and an EXE is out-of-process meaning it runs within its own process asynchronously. They can also be single or multi use, but the main difference is whilst a DLL basically operates as a glorified class module, an EXE operates in a parallel thread, using asynchronous callback notification. This is useful to provide multithreading abilities, for instance running the UI of an application in the host executable and then running a time-consuming processor intensive operation in the out of process thread so that the UI doesn't "freeze".