ATL Internals (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

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by Brent Rector, Chris Sells, Jim Springfield

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• Effective COM: 50 Ways to Improve Your COM and MTS-Based Applications (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series); Don Box(Editor), et al
• COM IDL and Interface Design; Al Major
• Professional Atl Com Programming; Richard Grimes
• ATL COM Programmer's Reference; Richard Grimes

The book begins with a tour of the ATL code generated by the Microsoft Visual C++ 6 AppWizard. The authors introduce fundamental ATL programming issues here, but they do not provide a general introduction to COM or ATL; they assume that readers have a good deal of background in both C++ and COM.

The book focuses on the extremely useful ATL support classes for managing strings (BSTRs), variants, and smart pointers. It covers the classes that help instantiate COM components (and examines support for different threading models and "creator" classes). The guide continues with object internals--covering object maps and the classes used to manage them--and interfaces, including aggregates and various interface design options. Information on ATL's support for persistence, which lets objects save and restore their state; on how ATL supports basic containers; and on interfaces that work with the Standard Template Library (STL) in C++ is well done.

Later sections explain how to work with windows and ActiveX controls. After some material on events (and connection points), the authors reveal ATL support for basic window operations, including dialogs. For building a custom ActiveX control, the authors provide an excellent example of a nicely functional visual control. (This code will prove invaluable since it illustrates all the essentials of ATL component programming.) --Richard Dragan

Book Description
Increasingly, developers are switching to component-based architectures to decrease development time and increase maintainability. While COM is the Microsoft technology that allows the components to interoperate, the Active Template Library (ATL) is the tool that simplifies the creation of these components. ATL provides a framework for building flexible and efficient components in C++. To achieve the best results, developers need to understand how ATL works internally, beyond the documentation provided. Designed to get COM developers up and running quickly, ATL Internals describes how to use Microsoft's ATL version 3.0, and demonstrates how ATL reduces the workload of developers by implementing most of the boilerplate code necessary for developing simple, straightforward COM classes.

This book takes a bottoms-up approach to writing components using ATL, focusing on the architecture underpinnings of ATL, how it maps to COM and the important implementation details. Building on this foundation, the book then discusses features common to COM objects beyond the basics. By the end, the reader will see how to build low-level components using ATL, without relying on the Wizard generated code.

Written by well-respected writer and teacher Brent Rector along with consultant and DevelopMentor instructor Chris Sells, the content of this book has been taught in courses for Wise Owl Consulting and DevelopMentor.

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