Chapter 7: ATL and ATL Server

Overview

The previous chapter looked at attributed programming , a major new feature for COM programmers that provides a great new way to write COM components using the Active Template Library (ATL). This chapter looks at the ATL library itself, starting with the changes that have been made in the ATL 7.0 release, and introduces the completely new ATL Server library.

ATL Server is now one of the three Microsoft C++ libraries, along with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) library and ATL. MFC is designed for writing desktop graphical user interface (GUI) applications, ATL is designed for writing COM components and ActiveX controls, and ATL Server provides functionality for server-side programming.

Chapter 8 moves away from ATL and looks at how to write components using the .NET Framework.

Note 

As with Chapter 6, this chapter will be of interest only to C++ programmers because ATL and ATL Server are purely C++ libraries.