Launching Internet Explorer

After you've built your adapter DLL, you must launch Internet Explorer such that it is aware that it is being used for the DualEngine API, as follows.

Required command-line arguments

The following command-line arguments must be present in order to launch Internet Explorer in the correct way to use the DualEngine API.

DualEngineAdapter

-DualEngineAdapter=<full-path-to-adapter-dll>

Indicates the path to the DualEngine API adapter DLL to load. For information on how to write an adapter DLL, see Creating a DualEngine adapter plugin DLL.

DualEnginePipe

-DualEnginePipe=<pipe-string>

This argument provides a string that is eventually passed to the adapter DLL via the DualEngineInitialize export. This can be used to pass a pipe name to your adapter code in order to bootstrap communication between your adapter and main application. Although DualEnginePipe is a required command-line parameter, it's only used if it's passed to your code through DualEngineInitialize. Therefore, despite its name, this need not be a pipe name; it can be any arbitrary string that you require.

APPID

APPID:<your-app-id>

This argument provides the Application User Model ID of your application. This ID is used to associate the Internet Explorer process with your application, for a number of Windows Shell features. For more information, see Application User Model IDs.

Optional command-line arguments

The following command-line argument is optional, to adjust Internet Explorer's behavior for the Dual Engine API.

DualEngineVersion

-DualEngineVersion=<force_version_number>

Forces Internet Explorer to instantiate DualEngine objects of the provided version, if it can. This will block the creation of DualEngine objects that don't match the provided version number, even if this version of Internet Explorer supports this version.

Diagnosing launch issues

There are a number of reasons that Internet Explorer may fail when launching. If this occurs before or while loading your DLL, it can be difficult to determine the exact reason and communicate it back to your application. Therefore, if Internet Explorer fails to launch while launching it for DualEngine use, get detailed error handling information by checking the StartupFailurePoint registry value.

StartupFailurePoint

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\EdgeIntegration\StartupFailurePoint

Contains a DWORD that indicates the location of the failure in the DualEngine startup path.

The DWORD maps to the following reasons:

DWORD	Reason
0	No failure.
1	Unused.
2	Unused.
3	The version specified by the DualEngineVersion argument was 0.
4	Failed to canonicalize the path passed in via DualEngineAdapter; see the StartupFailureHresult.
5	Unused.
6	Unused.
7	LoadLibrary failed for the provided adapter DLL; see the StartupFailureHresult.
8	Could not find DualEngineInitialize in the adapter DLL.
9	The call to DualEngineInitialize failed; see the StartupFailureHresult.
10	Failed to set the provided Application User Model ID; see the StartupFailureHresult.
11	DLL failed signature check.
12	Unused.
13	DLL did not have IDENTITY LIMITEDACCESSFEATURE resource.

StartupFailureHresult

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\EdgeIntegration\StartupFailureHresult

Contains a DWORD that's the failing HRESULT from the StartupFailurePoint, if there was a StartupFailureHresult. To see whether a given reason provides a StartupFailureHresult, see the above table.