VB Forum / COM / July 2005

fwiw, the only way I know of to get dependencies from a random com component
is to use the Depends utility or a Process Viewer.. this one's free and
it'll export a list to CSV. You have to start the app and run the viewer.
Select the app in the viewers windows, right click and select the Modules
submenu. There, it lists everything that the app's using.

Process Viewer  for Windows
http://www.xmlsp.com/pview/prcview.htm

If you're looking for a way to get dependencies for your app and/or it's
components, and not just random com components, I've written an add-in that
does this. It generates a class module that contains code to validate
everything listed in your components/references dialogs. Once generated, to
verify that everything's installed correctly, create an instance of the
class and call its VerifyInstallation method. It will go through the list
and fire an event before and after verifying each component, passing the
results down to you and allowing you to cancel at any time.

The list that ComGuard generates could easily be shown in an about box
(sounds like I need to add a new method specifically for that purpose)

Other than ComGuard, Depends and the process viewer, you can, in theory,
open a component (any PE file) as a file (binary of course) and parse its
"Import Table" structure. I've been looking into that as well. Not much info
available for VB. There's a few quickies on PlanetSourceCode.com but I've
seen nothing that would show a list, or anything that resembles a list of
dependencies.