Summary

This chapter has described attributed programming , an important upgrade to ATL that makes it much easier to write COM components in C++ using the ATL library. Many ATL developers will find they can now write COM components without having to interact with IDL or the ATL source code.

This chapter has shown you how to apply COM attributes to C++ code, and it has discussed all the common COM- related attributes. You should now be in a position to use attributes to produce COM components more simply than before, while still retaining control over the way in which they are implemented in ATL and represented in a type library.

The next chapter discusses the other major addition to ATL: the set of classes introduced for writing plugins for web servers, which are collectively known as ATL Server. Youll learn which classes form part of the ATL Server library and how to use them to create server applications.