ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition) [Paperback]

Christopher Tavares (Author), Kirk Fertitta (Author), Brent E. Rector (Author), Chris Sells (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321159624 | ISBN-13: 978-0321159625 | Publication Date: July 15, 2006 | Edition: 2

The Active Template Library (ATL) is a set of small, efficient, and flexible classes created by Microsoft that facilitate the creation of interoperable components for developing Windows applications. The latest version of ATL is version 8, released with Visual Studio 2005. While .NET has been getting all the attention recently, there is still a huge base of installed COM/ATL code. Many programmers are dealing with difficult issues adding new .NET code to that installed base. At the same time there are many instances where ATL is still the superior choice for new applications - applications that have to run fast and efficiently on Windows, where the CPU doesn't have the memory or bandwidth to run .NET. This book will be a godsend to developers in both of those situations. As one tech reviewer put it, "Any programmer needing to transition ATL code to .NET will need this book." The first edition was widely praised, and sold close to 20,000 units. While ATL is no longer the cutting edge of Microsoft developer tools, there should still be a strong market for authoritative, complete, deep coverage of the newest version of this standard tool.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The Classic Guide to ATL–Now Updated for ATL 8 and Visual Studio 2005

 

Four leading Windows programming experts systematically reveal ATL’s inner workings, explaining not just how ATL works, but why it works the way it does. Client-side developers will master ATL’s resources for windowing, COM control, MFC integration, web service proxy generation, and more. Server-side programmers will discover ATL’s full COM server and object services, and its extensive support for high-throughput, high-concurrency web applications, and services. Every Windows developer will learn powerful ways to increase flexibility, reduce overhead, and maximize transparency and control.

 

•           Discover ATL’s internals through diagrams, example code, and internal ATL implementation code

•           Walk through wizards that simplify ATL usage in common applications

•           Master string handling in C++, COM, and ATL

•           Leverage ATL smart types, including CComPtr, CComQIPtr, CComBSTR, and CComVariant

•           Understand and choose the right options for implementing IUnknown

•           Create glue code that exposes COM objects from COM servers

•           Use canned interface implementations to support object persistence, COM

            collections, enumerators, and connection points

•           Build standalone applications and UI components with ATL window classes

            and controls

•           Use ATL Server to develop web applications that run on Microsoft IIS

  

About the Author

Chris Tavares is currently a software development engineer in the Microsoft patterns and practices group, where he strives to help developers learn the best way to develop on the Microsoft platform. He first touched a computer in third grade, doing hand-assembly of machine code on an Intel 8080 machine with 512 bytes (yes, bytes) of memory, a hex keypad, and 7 segment LCD display. He’s been digging into computers and software ever since.

Kirk Fertitta is CTO of Pacific MindWorks, a leading provider of tools and services for electronic test and measurement. With his team at Pacific MindWorks, Kirk works extensively on code generation technology and Visual Studio extensibility. He is also a .NET/C# instructor for Pluralsight.

Brent Rector, president and founder of Wise Owl Consulting, is a noted speaker, consultant, and author, specializing in .NET, ASP.NET, XML, COM+, and ATL.

Chris Sells is a program manager for the Connected Systems Division. He’s written several books, including Programming Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms Programming in C#, and ATL Internals. In his free time, Chris hosts various conferences and makes a pest of himself on Microsoft internal product team discussion lists. More information about Chris, and his various projects, is available at http://www.sellsbrothers.com.

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 888 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 2 edition (July 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321159624
• ISBN-13: 978-0321159625
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #394,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chris Sells is a Program Manager for the Microsoft Developer Division. He's written several books, including Programming WPF, Windows Forms 2.0 Programming and ATL Internals. In his free time, Chris hosts various conferences and makes a pest of himself on Microsoft internal product team discussion lists. More information about Chris, and his various projects, is available at http://www.sellsbrothers.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deals with many legacy issues, August 8, 2006

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

Tavares and his co-authors present a specialised guide to the latest version of Active Template Library. It's for the C++ programmer on a Microsoft machine, who is also familiar with the Component Object Model. The authors specifically state that you really do need expertise in the latter.

The book deals with various legacy issues, mostly dating back to MFC, which is now largely deprecated. But there are also other aspects that are grubby and mostly unavoidable. For example, when dealing with character types, there is an abstraction called OLECHAR. Under Win32, it maps to wchar_t, while under Win16 [and the Mac] it maps to char. The need for this was due to the hardware improvements that took us from 16 bit CPUs to 32 bits. A transition that occurred mostly in the 80s. But for Microsoft, the legacy code remains in use. So there has to be low level logic that maps the character type to an actual appropriately sized memory allocation.

By the way, don't think this issue is confined to Microsoft. C code from that era that was developed for Unix machines, and which might still be in use, often has a similar problem. C macros dealing with this are a notorious source of porting errors.

The text deals with many other aspects of ATL. Some, like collections and enumerations, are very cleanly done. These classes are inherently meant to be high level abstractions. And the C++ code examples that use these are very easy to follow. The discussion of this also includes some sample Visual Basic code. (Most of the book has C++ code.)

6 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition), August 16, 2007

By 

Jong Am Park (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

Most reviews on this book were very good. It was the reason I bought this book. This book covers topic on the ATL 8 as its title says.

However, I don't like this book although I will read this book to the end.
The reason is this. Each chapter discuss about its own topics like strings, and so on. However, it just describes each methods of a given class. It is like that of the MSDN. Why doesn't it show some sample code lines which shows how to use some of them and what the result is? By doing so, it is much easier to understand and read. After reading a few chapters, I started skipping explanations because of the pattern.

Also, just like other books nowadays, it is too descriptive. It will be good if it is a book about explaining concept of the COM, or if it should give some idea on the topic. However, readers of this book already knows about the COM and if they consider "COM", they are already fairly experienced programmers. Then explaining things like the MSDN documents do is not helpful. Probably it would be better if it can explain thing more clearly than the MSDN do, but I guess it is not the case for this book.

Also, what lacks seriously among most COM books is that they fails to describe the automatically inserted macros and their relationship.
Also, for the Visual C++ 2005 IDE, there are some peculiar things. For example, the IDE displays the same interface under class and under interface on its solution pane. You may wonder where to put codes for a certain interface. It could be better if this book explains about them too.

Because COM is designed very confusing way, the Objective-C remote messaging, it needs good explanation. However, this ( and most ) book fails in doing so.

Additionally, it would be better if it has some tutorial chapters.
By following step by step, you can figure out things more clearly, but this book fails in that too. At least the first chapter seems to be written for that purpose. However, it omits some declarations and it is not implied where to put those. So, I gave up writing codes for the chapter.

However, as for the coverage of the topic, it seems to be chosen well.

I know.. people are moving to the C#/C++ .NET remoting.
Nowadays many books on COM/.NET interop are published. So, probably the important of COM is diminishing.
However, COM is still the core of the technology, and I'm not sure if the .NET stands for long-time. Even MS changed things about .NET abruptly so much, and people using .NET seem to use C# instead of C++ generally, I think it is not good idea to rely on proprietary technology. Yeah.. COM is proprietary. But your code using COM doesn't totally rely on proprietary code... at least C++ part...

I hope this book would be improved.