Professional Com Control Applications with ATL

Good content but poorley explained at times.Usefull for ATL controls as it has usefull information, if only it was better explained with more complete examples then it may have rated a 5. Still I believe it is a usefull book but I would welcome a later edition which gave controls a fuller explanation.

I read this bood as an introduction to COM. The back of the book says that anyone with a strong understanding of programming and C++ can learn COM from this book. The first two chapters were good, but in chapter three the author went into developing a COM application. For someone with no COM experience it was too much of a jump. I stopped reading the book about half way through chapter three and read Inside COM. It was a great introduction. I then went back to this book and found it to be a very good tutorial on using ATL, MTS and MSMQ in developing and using ActiveX and OLEDB COM applications. The As these are all very important things to know, I highly recommend the book; however, only after one receives a thorough introduction to COM elsewhere.

I found this book especially helpful with MTS and MSMQ. There were also a great deal of examples on how different paramter types were passed to COM objects created in ATL.I would suggest this book to anyone who is developing COM objects in ATL and is using MTS.I did however find mistakes in the debugging procedures for components in MTS. For the correct way to do it, you need to see the MSDN documentation of debugging VC++ components.I was also a little disappointed that the book seemed to be a re-hash of their ActiveX/COM Control programming book with the added features of MTS/MSMQ. Overall though, this is acceptable knowing the new information I gained from the book.

It is a excellent book, the thread modeling/apartment discussion in Chapter 2 is unique, and already worth the price. I found the rest of the book also well orginazed, it is a real practical book for writing COM applications.

If the first version of this book ( Professional Visual C++ 5 ActiveX/COM Control Programming ) was wonderful, this second version is excellent. The book takes you through the development of a real world three-tier application and along the way you get to learn a lot about The Microsoft Component Services (MCS) technology. It teaches you how to build flexible client-side ActiveX controls and DNA business objects for your middle-tier using DCOM, MTS, MSMQ and Universal Data Access using OLE DB and how to tie all these together to create robust applications. The authors do not assume any prior knowledge of COM or ATL on the part of the reader and they go about teaching you the concepts, reinforcing them with real world examples. The other unique feature of the book is the authors' identification and illustrations of design patterns used by COM. All the code is written in Visual C++ and sometimes tested out using VB. On the whole a great reading experience. We need more books like this one.