Com IDL and Interface Design

This book is a bottom up approach to COM, which starts from the IDL, but then goes through all the marshalling mechanisms, remote method calls, etc. About Mid-book Dr. Major presents an application design model which starts from the interfaces. The book will prove useful to those who want to design COM classes and interfaces that know how to behave based on whether they are local or remote, in-proc or out of proc and in general are better adapted to their environment.

I have read many COM books. But none of the books provided the ideas of using COM to design a large scale of system. In Dr. Al Major's book, he revealed the techniques of using COM to design a complex systems. If you want to understand COM interface and especially want to know how to use COM to design your system. This is an excellent book for it.

I have been a COM programmer for Texas Instruments for about 2 years. I taught myself how to program in COM by reading various COM books that gave excellent info about COM programming but, very little info about the cryptic looking IDL file and how to properly design interfaces. Dr. Al Major exposes how interfaces should be designed with clarity and reason.

I am a professional programmer for Microsoft with over 20 years experience. I have been writing COM code for nearly 2 years. This is an excellent book, for the professional. This book delivers what it promises. It's not about C++; it is about IDL and COM.

It might have been more accurate to title this book "Interface Design and COM IDL". The first half of the book focuses only on IDL, a subject that has not been systematically treated in any other COM book. It contains very clear explanations of COM remoting and marshaling and the use of IDL within the remoting infrastructure. The diagrams are excellent. The second half contains a detailed code example that shows both client and server bindings. I wish I'd had this book when I was writing my first VB and HTML plug -ins. It would have saved me a lot of time figuring stuff out, especially the use of alternate identity to implement "property get as QI". The server chapter is a gold-mine of code showing the application of advanced COM techniques. The re-usable ATL code for split / alternate identity alone is worth the price of the book.Once again Wrox delivers value.