Description:
Nathan Wallace's COM/DCOM Blue Book provides an excellent guide to the Component Object Model (COM) development using today's Microsoft tools, from the Active Template Library (ATL) and Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) in Visual C++ to Visual Basic and Visual J++. Alternating chapters in this book feature either tools-based programming exercises (using ATL, MFC, VB, and Visual J++) or explanations of the technical details underlying COM's many attributes and functions. After showing off basic COM projects, the author presents a short history of COM and its elemental pieces such as interfaces, reference counting, containment, and aggregation. The book also spotlights coding with object linking and embedding (OLE) Automation, including an early example of a simple COM server for encrypting string data, a sample that's just right for demonstrating essential COM principles. COM/DCOM then looks at ActiveX controls; shows off properties (and property pages), event handling, and persistence; and discusses distributed COM (DCOM) with examples that show how to run COM servers from remote clients. The best sections of the book cover the COM Variant data-type, Strings (or BSTRs), and the SAFEARRAY data type in all four programming environments. The book does a fine job of explaining these essential COM topics. Later sections glance at Internet programming (with ASP and dynamic HTML [DHTML] support in each tool). More in-depth coverage of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) comes at the end of the book (though the final chapter repeats whole paragraphs from an earlier section verbatim--obviously an editorial glitch). Overall, this book is a perfect choice for developers who want to take their COM skills to the next level. It demystifies many of the trickier aspects of COM using concise examples from each of Microsoft's major COM development tools. --Richard Dragan
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