Good Intro to COM Programming

Question

Is there a good book or website with a basic introduction to COM programming?

I am using C++, but I am hoping for a good overview.

Answer 1

I think the Don Box book, Essential COM, is necessary at some point. It starts out slow, but gets advanced pretty fast.

What language?

Answer 2

An old one, called 'Understanding ActiveX and OLE' is a better beginner's guide than Box's book. It's out of print now but you can get secondhand ones of Amazon.com for a song.

Answer 3

The following are good books on COM:

• Essential COM by Don Box (here on Amazon), as mentioned by Lou Franco
• Inside OLE by Kraig Brockschmidt (here on Amazon)

There are also a couple of old MSJ articles worth reading, also by Kraig Brockschmidt:

• How OLE and COM Solve the Problems of Component Software Design
• How COM Solves the Problems of Component Software Design, Part II

Answer 4

Essential COM is good. There are a bunch of good tutorials on Codeproject that help demystify it. Here are a few links:

• COM from scratch
• COM Basics
• COM in plain C

Hope these help!

Edit: Those links are articles about the basics of COM, which is pretty low-level stuff. It's good to understand, though, because if you get into more complicated things, like ATL, you'll be very confused if you have no idea what, say, IUnknown is, or what a class ID means.

Answer 5

Another classic is the "ATL Developer's Guide" by Armstrong. I typically recommend using ATL for COM development. Use another book to understand the basics of COM and then come to this one to get a great overview of what ATL has to offer to ease COM development. Granted, it is a bit dated, but the information is still relevant (I mean it is COM after all).