ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8
(2nd Edition) by Chris Sells
Deals With Many Legacy Issues
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 doesnt 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.
Personal Review: ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd
Edition) by Chris Sells
Tavares and his co-authors present a specialised guide to the latest
version of Active Template Library. It's for the C++ programmer on a
Microsoft machine, who is also familiar with the Component Object Model.
The authors specifically state that you really do need expertise in the latter.
The book deals with various legacy issues, mostly dating back to MFC,
which is now largely deprecated. But there are also other aspects that are
grubby and mostly unavoidable. For example, when dealing with character
types, there is an abstraction called OLECHAR. Under Win32, it maps to
wchar_t, while under Win16 [and the Mac] it maps to char. The need for
this was due to the hardware improvements that took us from 16 bit CPUs
to 32 bits. A transition that occurred mostly in the 80s. But for Microsoft,
the legacy code remains in use. So there has to be low level logic that
maps the character type to an actual appropriately sized memory
allocation.
By the way, don't think this issue is confined to Microsoft. C code from that
era that was developed for Unix machines, and which might still be in use,
often has a similar problem. C macros dealing with this are a notorious
source of porting errors.
The text deals with many other aspects of ATL. Some, like collections and
enumerations, are very cleanly done. These classes are inherently meant
to be high level abstractions. And the C++ code examples that use these
are very easy to follow. The discussion of this also includes some sample
Visual Basic code. (Most of the book has C++ code.)
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