Chapter 6: An Introduction to the Active Template Library

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Objectives:

• Generate component housing with the ATL COM AppWizard.

• Insert coclasses using the ATL Object Wizard.

• Understand ATL's registry scripting language.

• Populate your interfaces with methods à la ATL.

• Learn to add properties to a COM interface.

• Leverage ATL's support for COM text manipulation.

• Understand ATL's debugging options.

So far, this book has focused on the development of COM DLLs and EXEs using IDL and the C++ programming language. As you may have noticed, writing your COM servers without framework support is a "labor of love" and is often not the best approach for a large-scale COM project, given the sheer amount of repeat code. On the upside, however, ATL is of little use to developers who lack a firm understanding of the underpinnings of COM, which you have gained during the previous five chapters. The purpose of this chapter is to get you up and running with ATL and the common CASE tools used during the development process. In this chapter we will not be diving in too deeply into the underlying internals of ATL, leaving that task for the remainder of the book.

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