Why did you not make use of CComPtr, ComPtr or the _com_ptr_t smart pointers?

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ezzw7k98.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/br244983.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5yb2sfxk.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/h31ekh7e.aspx

I did use CComPtr, but they only reduce the amount of footguns, they don't get rid of them. In my case, I accidentally stored a reference to the inner pointer instead of calling Detach.

My point isn't that there aren't nice idiomatic ways of writing nice windows/c++ code that are not fragile, it's that unless you're well versed in them, you can easily screw things up pretty badly.

[EDIT]: In case it's not clear, I am not a windows C++ developer, I've read a decent amount of windows C++ code, so I sort of know what's going on, but I've written less than 5k lines of windows C/C++ in my life.

Fare enough. I know Windows since Win16 APIs days (started with Windows 3.0)

I would run into similar issues when coding for Apple platforms, for example.

I also had to do that recently and used Nim instead after spending too much time on it in C. For anyone attempting to do the same, I suggest 32bit Nim + msys2 + nimble install oldwinapi.