COM Interop with .NET 2.0

For the month of December I am working on this small project (3-weeks) involving making some information available to end users through a mobile device. Yeah, that's cool. However, the code that grabs the information from the backend was all written in good old VB6 and classic ASP.

I am running into this one issue that is driving me nuts. I am trying to assign a class object to a property in the COM object. While it works for some properties/methods, it does not seem to be working for some other.


VB6 code that works:
[

    1 Private mAuthor As clsSomething

    2 Private mAuthorID As Long

    3 

    4 Public Property Get Author_ClassParam() As clsSomething

    5     On Error GoTo handleError

    6 

    7     If mAuthor Is Nothing Then

    8         If mObjectID = 0 Then

    9             Err.Raise 111, , "xxx item not initialized"

   10         End If

   11 

   12         Set mAuthor = New clsSomething

   13         [--- deleted stuff---]

   14 

   15     End If

   16     Set Author = mAuthor

   17     Exit Property

   18 

   19 handleError:

   20     mError.Raise Err.number, "[xxxxHistoryItem]" & Err.Description, False

   21     Set Author = Nothing

   22 End Property

   23 

   24 Public Property Set Author_ClassParam(ByVal value As clsSomething)

   25     Set mAuthor = value

   26 End Property

]

VB6 code that does not works:
[

    1 Private mAuthor As clsSomething

    2 Private mAuthorID As Long

    3 

    4 Public Property Get Author_VariantParam() As clsSomething

    5     On Error GoTo handleError

    6 

    7     If mAuthor Is Nothing Then

    8         If mObjectID = 0 Then

    9             Err.Raise 111, , "xxx item not initialized"

   10         End If

   11 

   12         Set mAuthor = New clsSomething

   13         [--- deleted stuff---]

   14 

   15     End If

   16     Set Author = mAuthor

   17     Exit Property

   18 

   19 handleError:

   20     mError.Raise Err.number, "[xxxxHistoryItem]" & Err.Description, False

   21     Set Author = Nothing

   22 End Property

   23 

   24 Public Property Set Author_VariantParam(ByVal value As Variant)

   25     Set mAuthor = value

   26 End Property

]


this is the .NET code that calls that VB6 COM object:
[

    1 public void ClassAssignment_COM()

    2 {

    3     clsSomething oAuthor = new clsSomething();

    4     oAuthor.AuthorID = 15;

    5 

    6     clsTransaction oTrnx = new clsTransaction();

    7     oTrnx.Author_ClassParam = oAuthor;

    8     Trace.WriteLine(String.Format("bts- ClassParam.AuthorID: [{0}]", oTrnx.Author_ClassParam.AuthorID));

    9 }

   10 

   11 public void VariantAssignment_COM()

   12 {

   13     clsSomething oAuthor = new clsSomething();

   14     oAuthor.AuthorID = 15;

   15 

   16     clsTransaction oTrnx = new clsTransaction();

   17     oTrnx.Author_VariantParam = oAuthor;

   18     Trace.WriteLine(String.Format("bts- VariantParam.AuthorID: [{0}]", oTrnx.Author_VariantParam.AuthorID));

   19 }

]

I get this error message at compile time:

Error 3 Property, indexer, or event 'Author_VariantParam' is not supported by the language; try directly calling accessor methods 'xxxx._clsTransaction.get_Author_VariantParam' or 'xxxx._clsTransaction.set_Author_VariantParam(object)'
C:\vsProjects\Tests\mock.cs 168 27 xxxx.yyyApplication.Web.Test

I have not found a solution to this problem. I know that variants are not supported in .NET, but com'on, there's got to be someone out there that knows a workaround this issue...