Calling functions in an executable or accessing its global variables from a DLL

oohhh .. thats a hard one. Unless your executable exposes some sort of API I think you'd have to resort to using injection/hooking from the dll (which I presume is in another process) to access the functions in the executable, even then ...

Usually as Im sure you're painfully aware, a plugin system involves the executable 'discovering' its plugins, then possibly calling something within the plugin to say 'what do you expose/do', or has a narrowly defined interface, not the other way around ..

If it were me (and Ive been here before, and are about to venture in this space again), I would would have the exe expose its functions through an IPC or TCP/IP interface, presenting commands to a command interpreter built into the exe, but its hard to do that unless you build it from the ground up. My next app is going to have an inbuild mini-webserver in it for both input/output and control ..

Maybe you can research injection/hooking, the microsoft library 'detours' for example to see if that can help ... the danger with these (well, one of the dangers), is that the usage is tightly bound to your internals/classes ...

sorry, good luck

[edit] .. if it were just a matter of exposing global variables for instance, I'd be using a shared memory implementation [/edit]

'g'