Use COM interface without statically linking to library

Question

This may be a bit of a newbie question, but I just don't know! To use a function in a DLL that might not be present on the system I can use LoadLibrary and then GetProcAddress . But how can I do the same thing for a COM interface? I can include the header file for the declarations, IID's, and so on.. but I don't want to link against the accompanying library using #pragma comment(lib, "blabla.lib") .

(I'm trying to use the WICImagingFactory interface, and that requires linking against windowscodecs.lib to compile)

Thanks

Answer 1

There's no need to fight against linking windowscodecs.lib. Linking against it doesn't result in implicit linking as you would get for a non-COM library.

You still need to call CoCreateInstance() just as you would for any COM object. Think of this as being runtime binding equivalent to GetProcAddress .