How to use TComInterface properly?

Question

I would like to use TComInterface to replace raw pointer.

My current code is:

{
TComInterface<IStoreNamespace> pStore;
if (SUCCEEDED(CoCreateInstance(CLSID_StoreNamespace, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_IStoreNamespace, (LPVOID*)&pStore)))
    {
    if (SUCCEEDED(pStore->Initialize(Form1->Handle, 1)))
        {
        //pStore->CallOtherMethods...
        }
    }
// Release()'d automatically?
}

If I understood correctly this overwrites the pStore pointer with new pointer so it doesn't call pStore->Release(); automatically from eventually previous instance using pStore.

Under what conditions is Release() called? I believe it may be when the variable goes out of scope even if I initialized it like this. And what is the proper way to initialize pStore in above example so it doesn't just overwrite pointer but also calls Release() first?

Answer 1

TComInterface calls Release() on its internal interface when TComInterface goes out of scope and gets destructed. You can also call the TComInterface::Unbind() method if you want to manually Release() the interface sooner. TComInterface also calls Release() on its current interface if you assign a new interface pointer (or other TComInterface instance) via the = assignment operator.

TComInterface overrides the & operator to return a pointer to its internal interface, so you have to make sure that TComInterface is not holding an active interface before you call CoCreateInstance() (or anything else that will copy a new interface into TComInterface) or else the preview interface will be leaked and not released. TComInterface's default constructor sets the internal interface to NULL, so you don't usually have to worry about that, unless you re-use the same TComInterface variable multiple times, such as when using interface enumerators in a loop.