Conclusion

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The choices you make when you use the ATL COM AppWizard, the ATL Object Wizard, and the Add Method dialog box significantly impact the architecture and implementation of your COM components. Although each of these productivity features is beneficial, they all must be used judiciously and with an understanding of the effect they have on the outcome of your components. In this chapter alone, we've discussed several key concepts you'll need to understand when creating components with ATL:

• The ATL preprocessor symbols
• The AppWizard-generated build configurations
• The choice of a threading model
• The advantages and drawbacks of dual interfaces
• The support needs of clients built using different languages, including ASP, Visual Basic, and Visual C++

In the next chapter, we'll see how ATL also makes using COM objects a little more painless with its client-side helper classes.