ATL

COM Clients

ATL has some wrapper classes to help simplify COM clients. Here are some common ones:

C type ATL class runtime type
void * ATL CComPtr _com_ptr_t
BSTR ATL CComBSTR _bstr_t
VARIANT ATL CComVariant _variant_t
IDispatch ATL CComDispatchDriver

The ATL classes are in atl.dll, the runtime types are compiler COM support extensions in comsuppw.lib.

The main difference in usage is that the ATL classes return error codes and the runtime types throw _com_error exceptions. Typically the runtime types are used in clients and the ATL classes are used in servers, because you have to be more careful about throwing exceptions.

COM Servers

The COM server is mostly set up when you run AppWizard. This code contains self-registration, server activation logic, lifetime management logic, IDL, a COM object map, etc.

There are quite a lot of wrapper classes involved, but you don’t need to understand this machinery to use it. Look but don’t touch.

These are some flags to consider when setting up a COM server:

Flag Effect
_ATL_MIN_CRT Dynamically link to msvcrt.dll
_UNICODE You’ll probably want this
_DEBUG, NDEBUG Debug or not
_ATL_DLL, _ATL_STATIC_REGISTRY Dynamically link to the registration code in atl.dll, or put it in the server
_MERGE_PROXYSTUB For InProc servers, place the parameter marshaling code in the server DLL

Use the AppWizard again to add COM objects to the server. Right click project | Add | New Item… | ATL Object. It will automatically update the IDL and object map.

COM Objects

To add methods and variables to the objects, right click project | Class Wizard. After that, each method must also be added to the IDL manually.

ATL has several facilities to support COM objects. They can be grouped into these areas:

References