ATL Internals (Addison-wesley Object Technology Series) - Softcover

Rector, Brent E.; Sells, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201695898 ISBN 13: 9780201695892

Publisher: Addison Wesley, 1999

Synopsis

"This book is the definitive reference for ATL programmers. The chapter on CComObject is worth the price alone."--Don Box, COM guy, DevelopMentor"Brent and Chris are always technically accurate and present the information in a well written, easy to understand manner...I bought it and I'm the ATL Development Lead!"--Christian Beaumont, ATL Development Lead, Microsoft Corporation The Active Template Library (ATL) is a set of small, efficient, and flexible classes that facilitate the creation of interoperable COM components. Written for experienced COM and Visual C++ programmers, this book provides in-depth coverage of ATL's inner workings. It offers insight into the rationale behind ATL design, explains its architectural underpinnings, shows how ATL maps to COM, and describes important implementation details. With coverage current through ATL version 3.0, ATL Internals includes an overview of the Wizards but then goes well beyond the basics. The authors provide the detailed information needed to utilize ATL to its greatest advantage and work around its shortcomings.You will find detailed coverage of such topics as: *ATL Smart Types, such as CComPtr, CComVariant, and CComBSTR *Objects in ATL, covering COM object responsibilities and ATL threading model support *Servers in ATL, including ATL's class object implementations, managing server lifetime, self-registration, and server build optimizations *Interface maps, focusing on the techniques C++ programmers can use to implement COM interfaces and how ATL supports these techniques *Persistence and connection points *Enumeration, covering both pre-calculated and dynamic data sets, and enumerating over an STL container *ATL windowing classes *Controls and Control Containment If you want to optimize ATL by learning effective techniques that reduce the time you spend writing boilerplate COM code, there is no better resource than this book. 0201695898B04062001

About this title

Review

Written for the advanced C++ programmer, ATL Internals reveals the inner workings of the Active Template Library (ATL), the toolkit of choice for building today's lightweight Internet and server components.

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 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 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

Review

"I've often thought that I should write a book on how ATL works. After reading ATL Internals, I don't think there would be much left for me to write about." ― Jim Springfield, Inventor of ATL, Microsoft Corporation

"This book is the definitive reference for ATL programmers. The chapter on CcomObject is worth the price alone." ― Don Box, COM guy, DevelopMentor

"Brent and Chris are always technically accurate and present the information in a well written, easy to understand manner... I bought it and I'm the ATL Development Lead! " ― Christian Beaumont, ATL Development Lead, Microsoft Corporation

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison Wesley
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0201695898
• ISBN 13: 9780201695892
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 656