Abstract: Adornments are applied to shapes in a diagram that graphically displays data about those shapes. Once the adornments are applied to a shape, the information displayed is automatically updated as the underlying shape data changes. The appearance of the diagram is updated automatically when the user updates the data for their shapes. The set of adornments that may be applied to shapes is extensible. A mechanism and interface is defined for creating additional adornments that have customized looks or behaviors.

Abstract: A method and system for interfacing to type libraries are provided. In a preferred embodiment, the present invention defines an interface to a type library. The interface has a plurality of interface methods through which type information can be stored in and retrieved from the type library. A plurality of implementations of the defined interface are provided. A computer program is compiled using the defined interfaces to access the type information. When the compiled computer program is executed, it accesses the type information using one of the plurality of implementations. In a preferred embodiment, a type library contains type information to allow a compiler to bind to an instance of type at compile type (early binding).