Chapter 1. Hello, ATL

Welcome to the Active Template Library (hereafter referred to as ATL). In this chapter, I present a few of the tasks that you'll probably want to perform using ATL and the integrated wizards. This is by no means all of what ATL can accomplish, nor is it meant to be exhaustive coverage of the wizards or their output. In fact, the rest of this book focuses on how ATL is implemented to provide the Component Object Model (COM) glue that holds together this example (as well as several others). This chapter is actually just a warm-up to get you familiar with the support that the Visual Studio environment provides the ATL programmer.