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.