CodeGuru Staff

Recently, I have become involved in the production of ActiveX controls for the first time and have had to learn the ropes (IDL syntax, message reflection, stock properties and methods etc). Mostly I am happy with the readily available functionality offered by MFC, however one of the things that annoys me is the shamelessly Windows […]

The WTL is an extension to the ATL, developed by the same ATL team, and shipped by Microsoft with the January 2000 Platform SDK (available for download from Microsoft), although undocumented. The WTL extends the ATL windowing classes by providing a lightweight framework for writing Win32 applications and controls, specialized views, GDI objects, and utility […]

If an interface of an object is not used often, it might be more efficient to delay the creation of the interface until it is actually requested, especially if the initialization of the object is expensive. The interface will be created only when a client needs it, and it will be released after the client […]

Download Source Code and Example The Icmpcom project is a basic ALT template created by the ATL wizard. The control acts as an interface to the ICMP.DLL . This DLL is supplied by MS to allow PING and TRACERTs to be run under a dos window. The Control can be used by a VB5 app […]

Here I put a collection of helper and workaround classes/macros I developed through my experience with ATL and popularized at our site. I guess it might be useful to others. I don’t pretend to be original or smartest and apologize if similar ideas or code were already appeared anywhere. What’s included: Yet another smart pointer […]

Some scripting clients of an automation server will only be able to access the default automation interface. So, if your server exposes its functionality through several interfaces, these clients will only be able to access some of your functionality. A COM-capable (i.e., VTBL-aware) client–for example, a client written in C++–will be able to access other […]

In this article I’ll provide an introduction to the ATL windowing classes, and a simple cookbook tutorial on an ATL frame-view application — you’ll see that it’s actually quite easy to implement front-end functionality equivalent to the MFC. The learning curve with ATL windowing is much less steep and much shorter than learning the MFC […]

Click here for larger image For a long time, containment was considered unfashionable, and originally the ATL didn’t support it, although the ATL has always supported aggregation to some degree. The added opportunity with containment – that you can enhance the inner object method behaviour in the outer object re-implementations – is also its added […]

In the normal COM scheme of things, the communication between client and server is driven by the client. The client creates the server’s COM object, and makes calls into the object as it needs to. The object generally sits there passively waiting for calls from clients. However, sometimes, things happen which make the server want […]

Environment: Visual C++ 6.0 Using a resizable dialog is a great way to make a dialog behave like a traditional window, but sometimes there’s a need to have a control resize along with the dialog, particularily when you’re attempting to use the control as a psuedo-document view. Here’s one solution on how to make the […]

Environment: VC6 SP3, IE 4.01 This is mainly for the list control’s report view look & feel – you can use older controls, it just won’t be so pretty – set in CDlgTest::OnInitDialog(). You may have noticed that the standard CListCtrl gets slow once you need to display lots of items. The time for both […]

This button minimizes an application, removes the icon window out of the taskbar and puts an icon in the systemtray, freeing up more space on the taskbar this way. A left mouse click on the icon will restore the window, while a right mouse click will popup the system menu of the corresponding window. The […]