Customer Reviews

ActiveX Controls Inside Out, with CD

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Book deals with one single ActiveX control, with no UI, and a simplistic purpose. Yet the author spends 80% of the book explaining the *business logic* (not the ActiveX-specific issues) of this silly example. (and the code listings of every iteration) Good beginning, good chapter on VBX to OCX (if you need that), but overall dissapointing. Hardly "inside-out" coverage to a proficient VC++ developer.

First this book names all of the features of ActiveX but never gives enough detail for the reader to fully understand. Then it hides the nuts and bolts by using MS Control Wizards. If a control ever breaks and Microsoft's Wizards can't fix it for you, you have a snowballs chance in hell of finding anything useful in this book.

the stars are given to the style that explains things from the ground. However, it's out of date somehow for COM programming using MFC. I'd like to recommend Beginning MFC COM. (4 stars, unless you have a good understanding on COM, otherwise, go to Inside COM =>Essential COM first).

I'm wasn't a beginner when I started this book. I had already studied Inside COM by Dale Rogerson and Inside Distributed COM, so I was able to appreciate the depth that this book goes into. I suggest that anyone else planning to buy this book start with those other books to gain a firm background in COM.

To learn ActiveX/COM/ATL programming, I bought this book and Tom Armstrong's ATL. I'm not used to Denning's english style, too many words, as recorded from a training class and I had to be extremely patient to follow. Armstrong's book is a lot readable for me, he explains COM in plain and simple language. But this book is still very useful because of it's depth.

After reading the cover endorsement by Microsft VP Victor Stone, my excitement soon dimmed when I studied Adam's writings. No clear picture of a recognizable architecture emerged.

The book presents examples in C++ source code complete with at least two instances of potential memory leaks, while at the same time asserting this code's thread-safety! According to the bibliography Adam now works primarily with Java: at least no more memory leaks there.

After reading this book I believe I now may have a much better understanding of why Microsoft may have internal problems with their ActiveX technology groups and possibly why so many of Microsoft's own COM-based applications tend to blow up so dramatically and so frequently.

The book has one big strong point for anyone wanting to convert VBXs to OCXs. It has an entire chapter on this topic and was useful for me in converting my old controls to the new stuff. The book does a good job explaining controls using MFC and is easy to read if you have experience writing controls already.

Chapter 3 of this book is the most frustrating part. In this chapter, the author wants to showcase so much stuff he hasn't yet explained, which makes it extremely difficult to understand. However, from the second section of chapter 4 it begins to make sense. Part II: the basics of ActiveX controls is actually pretty good, the style and approach are more or less similar to what you can find in "Inside VC++". If you have the patience to follow the examples in Part II, you may get some understanding of the basics and some practice as well. My suggestion is: read "Inside COM" first, then skip the first three chapters of this book. After you're done with part II, you should be able to write ActiveX controls (is that too much to ask for anyway?).

Like most Microsoft Publications, this book is totally impossible to penetrate for the beginner, or the intermediate beginner. It is twisted and illogical, jumping from one exception to the next. I don't blame the author for the chaos, blame Microsoft. I think in a few weeks or months I may understand what a Property really is and how I can use it. Looks like preaching to the converted to me. At least it trys to be funny. Like being funny in a torture chamber.

If you are looking to develop in-process ActiveX controls, this book will make a very good reference. Although the examples could be more mainstream, the technology detailed makes it a read worth your while. After all, it is as close to the source as you can get & you get this without worrying about marshalling, local or remote. The focus is on free marshaling, a.k.a. non-existant, as it should be.