ATL Internals
- By Brent E. Rector, Chris Sells
- Published Mar 31, 1999 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series series.
- Copyright 1999
- Dimensions: 7-3/8x9-1/4
- Pages: 656
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-201-69589-8
- ISBN-13: 978-0-201-69589-2
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"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
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DevelopMentor
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Don't do ATL or COM without it, By The Heavy Artillery (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: ATL Internals (Paperback)
This is simply one book that you do not want to be without when designing and implementing a COM project. I purchased the book after I found myself in my first COM project and without any coworkers with any experience in this area. As a comment, I've also rummaged around the Internet and purchased many other books in the effort to come up to speed as quickly as I can. ATL Internals is the best source of data on ATL that I've found so far.ATL Internals not only discusses ATL but also does an excellent job discussing COM's theory of operation and how a Win32 OS supports COM. As a warning, however, ATL Internals isn't the only book that you need on a COM project because it is specialized on ATL (and on COM in general). While ATL is useful it is not the only thing that you will have to deal with on a COM project. You will probably need to work with IDL files and for that I can unequivocally recommend "Essential IDL" by Martin Gudgin. ATL Internals... Read more
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Simply the best! Five stars, no doubts!, By Stan Danilov (Dublin, Ireland (born in Russia)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: ATL Internals (Paperback)
"ATL INTERNALS" is a superb source of information about how ATL works. If you want to be a pro in ATL then go and buy it.I read it TWICE. Never before anything like that ever happened to me! Well done, lads! Thanks!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Very professional book,
By A Customer
This review is from: ATL Internals (Paperback)
This book covers ATL Internals in a very professional and essential way.I would recommend to read this book only after dealing with simple COM objects , and getting familiar with this technology. I read it after i have finished to read "Inside COM (MS press )" and it is a good order. This book is very recommended for professional programmers.
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Praise For ATL Internals
"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
Preface
C is a framework for generating assembly language code (ASM). Most ASM programmers shifting to C spent a lot of time examining and replacing the compiler-generated code because they didn't trust the compiler to create correct code. As time went on and C compilers got better, ASM programmers gradually learned to trust the compiler to generate not only correct code, but also efficient code. Of course, talented C programmers never forget that the compiler is generating ASM. They know that they can still reach into selected areas and dictate the generated code when their needs exceed the capabilities of the language.
Microsoft's Active Template Library (ATL) is a framework for generating C++/COM code. Most C++ programmers shifting to ATL seem to fear examining, let alone replacing, ATL-generated code. They don't trust ATL any more than ASM programmers trusted their C compilers, because the source for ATL is fairly inscrutable to the casual observer. However, ATL is performing the same services for the C++/COM programmer that the C compiler performed for ASM programmers, namely, providing a simpler way to generate boilerplate code correctly and efficiently. Of course, talented ATL programmers never forget that ATL is generating C++/COM code. They know that they can still reach into selected areas and dictate the generated code when their needs exceed the capabilities of ATL. Our goal in writing this book is to turn you into an ATL programmer, unafraid to reach into it and bend it to your will.
This book is for the C++/COM programmer shifting to ATL 3.0, as provided with Visual C++ 6.0. Because ATL was built with a set of assumptions, to be an effective ATL programmer you need to understand not only how ATL is built but also why. Of course, to understand the why of ATL, you'll have to understand the environment in which ATL was developed, that is, COM. Instead of attempting to compress all required COM knowledge into one or two chapters, this book assumes you already know COM and shows you the design, usage, and internals of ATL. Don Box's Essential COM (Addison-Wesley, 1998) is a good source of COM knowledge, if you'd like to brush up before diving into ATL.
With the exception of the first chapter, this book was arranged from the lowest levels of ATL to the highest, each chapter building on knowledge in previous chapters. The first chapter is a brief overview of some of the more common uses for ATL, and the wizards (if they exist) that aid in these uses. Whenever things get too detailed in the first chapter, however, we refer you to a subsequent chapter that will provide more in-depth coverage. Chapters 2 through 5 present the core of ATL. Chapter 2 covers the ATL smart types, such as CComPtr, CComQIPtr, CComBSTR, and CComVariant. Chapter 3 discusses how objects are implemented in ATL, concentrating on the great range of choices you have when implementing IUnknown. Chapter 4 discusses the glue code required to expose COM objects from COM servers. Chapter 5 delves into the implementation of IUnknown again, this time concentrating on how to implement QueryInterface, showing techniques such as tear-off interfaces and aggregation. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 discuss canned interface implementations that ATL provides to support object persistence, connection points, and COM collections and enumerators, respectively. These services can be used by components that may or may not provide their own user interface. Chapters 9, 10, and 11, on the other hand, concentrate on building both standalone applications and user interface components. These chapters cover the ATL window classes, controls, and control containment, respectively. Because much of what makes the ATL source difficult to read is its advanced use of templates, Appendix A provides a set of examples meant to illustrate how templates are used and built. If you've seen ATL source code before and wondered why you can pass the name of a deriving class to a base class template, you may find Appendix A useful. Appendix B provides a list of the important ATL classes and the header files in which they are declared (and often implemented).
When writing these chapters, it became necessary not only to show diagrams and sample usage code, but also internal ATL implementation code. In fact, this book often becomes your personal tour guide through the ATL source code.
Because the ATL team didn't write their code to be published in book form, it was often necessary to reformat it or even to abbreviate it. Every effort has been made to retain the essence of the original code, but, as always, the ATL source code is the final arbiter. You might find Appendix B useful when tracking down the actual implementation.
If there are any errors in the sample source or in any part of this book, you may contact Brent Rector at http://www.wiseowl.com and Chris Sells at http://www.sellsbrothers.com. The source code used in this book is available at http://www.wiseowl.com/ATLInternals.htm.
The authors would like to thank all of the following for their contributions to this book. While it may have been possible to complete this book without them, it would have been a pale imitation of what we were able to achieve with their help. Chris would like to thank his wife, Melissa, and his boys, John and Tom, for sparing him the countless evenings and weekends to work on this project. Chris would also like to thank Brent Rector for letting him horn in on his book project.
Brent would like to thank his wife, Lisa, and his children, Carly and Sean, for delaying the delivery of this book significantly. If it weren't for them, he'd never leave the computer some days. Brent would like to thank Chris for his intelligence, patience, and general good looks.(1)
Brent and Chris would like to thank several folks together. Special thanks to Christian Beaumont, Jim Springfield, Walter Sullivan, and Mark Kramer for suffering our nagging questions and taking the time to answer them. More special thanks to Don Box for his MSJ ATL feature, which so heavily influenced the course and, in turn, this book. Thanks to the reviewers: Don Box, Keith Brown, Jon Flanders, Mike Francis, Kevin Jones, Stanley Lippman, Dharma Shukla, Jim Springfield, Jeff Stalls, Jaganathan Thangavelu, and Jason Whittington. Special thanks goes to Dharma for his especially thorough, and educational, reviews. Thanks to fellow DevelopMentor instructor Fritz Onion for his groundbreaking work delving into the depths of ATL control containment. Thanks to a former student, Valdan Vidakovic, for inspiring Chris to delve a bit more into the HTML control. Thanks to Tim Ewald, Jim Springfield, and Don Box for their help in developing the forwarding shims trick. Thanks to the members of the ATL and DCOM mailing lists, especially Don Box, Tim Ewald, Charlie Kindel, Valery Pryamikov, Mark Ryland, and Zane Thomas. And last, but not least, thanks to Addison-Wesley, especially J. Carter Shanklin and Krysia Bebick, for providing an environment in which we actually want to write (although not as quickly or as concisely as they might like).
(1) You only get one guess as to who wrote this sentence, and he doesn't have my initials or my good looks. BER
0201695898P04062001
Table of Contents
Foreword.
Preface.
1. Hello, ATL.
2. ATL Smart Types: Strings, BSTRs, VARIANTs, and Interface Pointers.
3. Objects in ATL.
4. COM Servers.
5. Interface Maps.
6. Persistence in ATL.
7. Collections and Enumerators.
8. Connection Points.
9. Windowing.
10. ActiveX Controls.
11. Control Containment.
Appendix A: C++ Templates by Example.
Appendix B: ATL Classes and Headers.
Index. 0201695898T04062001
Book
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