Learning DCOM

Scope of This Book

I’ve designed this book so that each chapter assumes knowledge from the previous one. This allows you to read the book from beginning to end, limiting the need for jumping here and there among chapters. To give you a heads up, here are brief summaries for the chapters and appendices covered in this book.

Chapter 1, takes a brief look at the progress of distributed computing. While it describes several popular distributed computing technologies, its real purpose is to point out that the communications layer becomes more advanced as time progresses. It is this advancement that gives birth to technologies such as RPC and Distributed COM.

Chapter 2, provides a high-level introduction to COM and the motivation of this ubiquitous technology. This chapter also provides a general examination of the important facilities and services that a typical distributed object technology should support. It uses the COM terminology that prepares you to take on the rest of the chapters in this book.

Chapter 3, gets down to the nuts and bolts of COM. This chapter teaches you the fundamental elements and requirements for building a distributed object using pure C++. Since COM enforces the separation of interface from implementation, I first take you on a tour of interface definition and then show you how to implement the specified interfaces. Along the way, you’ll learn the Microsoft Interface Definition Language (MIDL), MIDL data types, error handling, the binary layout of a COM interface, ...