Foreword to the Second Edition

Wow. It has been a long time since I wrote the foreword for the first edition of ATL Internals. Reading through the old introduction really takes me down memory lane; I can hardly believe that it has been almost eight years. Not long after I wrote it, I moved on to the Windows team at Microsoft and then on out of Microsoft a year later. I came back to Microsoft (and the Visual C++ team) a few years ago, and I am now managing several development teams in Visual C++. One of these is the libraries team, of which ATL is a part, and it is fun to be involved in ATL again. Jan and Christian have both moved on, although Nenad expanded the windowing classes from ATL that I mentioned in the first introduction into a separate library called WTL (Windows Template Library^[1]). WTL is now a Microsoft open-source project that Nenad manages.

^[1] http://wtl.sourceforge.net

ATL has changed in ways I never could have predicted, and it has been bittersweet to see it continue to grow without being personally involved. There have been many great people who have worked on ATL over the years. Some of them I have known quite well and others I never knew.

When I mentioned "some new ways of accessing the ATL functionality" in the first foreword, I was referring to attributes. This technology was delivered in Visual Studio .NET 2002, but it never really developed into what we envisioned. ATL attributes still work in the current release and they can be quite powerful, but there are no plans to expand their use. This new version of ATL Internals provides lots of updates and does cover attributes, but doesn't assume that you're going to depend on this feature. This edition also includes a very nice introduction to ATL Server, which provides a flexible, high-performance way to create web applications. If performance is a critical requirement, ATL Server was built for you. Other ATL 8 improvements include better security, full 64-bit support, better scalability, debugging improvements, support for C++/CLI, and managed ATL components.

What has become the .NET ecosystem was just getting underway back in 1998. It has revolutionized programming for many developers and will continue to deliver improvements in the years to come. However, COM programming (and ATL) is still very much alive and is very important to many developers both inside and outside of Microsoft. The second edition of this book, like the first, provides the details you need to maximize your investment in those technologies.

Jim Springfield

April, 2006