The '''winsend''' package is an attempt to implement the Tk send command for Tk under MS Windows using COM to handle the registration and interprocess communication for us. When loaded into an interpreter the package will automatically register the interp in the system's running object table. The ''winsend interps'' command can be used to show all the registered interpreters and unlike using [dde] this command will not be blocked by badly behaving windows applications.

 An example (from tkcon):         from a concurrent tclsh:
   % package require winsend  |     % package require winsend
   0.4                        |     0.4
   % winsend interps          |     % winsend interps
   tkcon.tcl                  |     tkcon.tcl TCLSH.EXE
                              |     % winsend send tkcon.tcl set x 1
                              |     1
   % set x                    |
   1                          |
   % winsend send TCLSH.EXE set y 2
                              |     % after 2000 {set zx 1} ; vwait zx
   2                          |     % set y
                              |     2
                              |     % exit
   % winsend interps          |
   tkcon.tcl                  |

As you can see from the above session - we require an event loop to be
running to handle the incoming send. Technically, this is because we
are using an Apartment threaded object and COM apartments serialize
access to object by using the Windows message queue. A future version
could side-step this by creating a free-threaded object but we are
trying to implement Tk's send here.

An interesting side-effect is that we can access the running tcl
interpreter from any COM based scripting language. Here is an example
of a VB script file you can run using 'cscript test.vbs' under
windows. It will also work from MS Words macro editor etc. You need to
start up an interpreter and load the winsend package (for instance -
using tkcon):

  Set interp = GetObject("\\.\TclInterp\tkcon.tcl")
  interp.Send "puts {Hello from VB Script}"
  WScript.Echo interp.Send("info tcl")

You should see the message printed in your tkcon window and see your
Tcl version printed in your DOS box.

See
  http://tclsoap.sourceforge.net/winsend.html
and
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tclsoap/winsend-0.4.zip
for the docs (this document) and code respectively. [PT]

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[Category Package]