Hooking Alibre Design

Now we need to contact Alibre Design through COM. Be sure that Alibre Design is currently running on your system when you start this application. The "Root" in this case is basically the top-level Alibre Design application -- like the Home window -- and it allows us to do things such as displaying the Alibre Design version number (line 46).

    ' Hook Alibre Design
    Dim hook As AutomationHook = _
      Marshal.GetActiveObject("AlibreX.AutomationHook")
    Dim root As IADRoot = hook.Root

    ' Write out the "Version:" then the Alibre Design version
    Call Console.WriteLine("Version: " & root.version)