ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition)

You looking to find the "ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition)" Good news! You can purchase ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition) with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

Product Description

The Active Template Library (ATL) is a set of small, efficient, and flexible classes created by Microsoft that facilitate the creation of interoperable components for developing Windows applications. The latest version of ATL is version 8, released with Visual Studio 2005. While .NET has been getting all the attention recently, there is still a huge base of installed COM/ATL code. Many programmers are dealing with difficult issues adding new .NET code to that installed base. At the same time there are many instances where ATL is still the superior choice for new applications - applications that have to run fast and efficiently on Windows, where the CPU doesn't have the memory or bandwidth to run .NET. This book will be a godsend to developers in both of those situations. As one tech reviewer put it, "Any programmer needing to transition ATL code to .NET will need this book." The first edition was widely praised, and sold close to 20,000 units. While ATL is no longer the cutting edge of Microsoft developer tools, there should still be a strong market for authoritative, complete, deep coverage of the newest version of this standard tool.

ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition) Review

Most reviews on this book were very good. It was the reason I bought this book. This book covers topic on the ATL 8 as its title says.

However, I don't like this book although I will read this book to the end.
The reason is this. Each chapter discuss about its own topics like strings, and so on. However, it just describes each methods of a given class. It is like that of the MSDN. Why doesn't it show some sample code lines which shows how to use some of them and what the result is? By doing so, it is much easier to understand and read. After reading a few chapters, I started skipping explanations because of the pattern.

Also, just like other books nowadays, it is too descriptive. It will be good if it is a book about explaining concept of the COM, or if it should give some idea on the topic. However, readers of this book already knows about the COM and if they consider "COM", they are already fairly experienced programmers. Then explaining things like the MSDN documents do is not helpful. Probably it would be better if it can explain thing more clearly than the MSDN do, but I guess it is not the case for this book.

Also, what lacks seriously among most COM books is that they fails to describe the automatically inserted macros and their relationship.
Also, for the Visual C++ 2005 IDE, there are some peculiar things. For example, the IDE displays the same interface under class and under interface on its solution pane. You may wonder where to put codes for a certain interface. It could be better if this book explains about them too.

Because COM is designed very confusing way, the Objective-C remote messaging, it needs good explanation. However, this ( and most ) book fails in doing so.

Additionally, it would be better if it has some tutorial chapters.
By following step by step, you can figure out things more clearly, but this book fails in that too. At least the first chapter seems to be written for that purpose. However, it omits some declarations and it is not implied where to put those. So, I gave up writing codes for the chapter.

However, as for the coverage of the topic, it seems to be chosen well.

I know.. people are moving to the C#/C++ .NET remoting.
Nowadays many books on COM/.NET interop are published. So, probably the important of COM is diminishing.
However, COM is still the core of the technology, and I'm not sure if the .NET stands for long-time. Even MS changed things about .NET abruptly so much, and people using .NET seem to use C# instead of C++ generally, I think it is not good idea to rely on proprietary technology. Yeah.. COM is proprietary. But your code using COM doesn't totally rely on proprietary code... at least C++ part...

I hope this book would be improved.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition)" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition) ...