Chapter 3. Objects
In this chapter:
Having gone through a general overview of COM in the last chapter, you now will get intimate with it. First, let’s get one thing straight. COM is nothing new because it builds purely on top of proven successful software technologies, including object-oriented and distributed computing technologies. These technologies thoroughly separate interface from implementation. Everyone who has any exposure to encapsulation and software layering can more or less relate to COM.
Tip
The interface definitions and C++ code that you see in this chapter can be automated by Visual C++ and the ATL wizards with a few mouse clicks. Even so, it’s important for you to see what’s going on in the code and not just rely on clicking a few buttons. You can’t understand what choices to make from the wizards until you know how to create a COM object from scratch. Moreover, performance is heavily affected by the choices that you make. Consider the information in this chapter (and in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5), the internals of the wizard-generated code that is presented in Chapter 6, and onwards. In short, you’ll be empowered with the knowledge gained from Chapter 3 through Chapter 6.
Similar to other programming disciplines, the basics of COM include three things: COM interfaces, COM objects, and COM class factories.[16] For brevity, we usually leave off the word COM and simply say interfaces, objects, and class factories. In COM programming, an interface ...
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