Programming with Microsoft Visual C++.NET 6ed [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Introduction

The release of the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (and Visual C++ .NET in particular) has underscored Microsoft's increasing focus on Internet technologies, which are at the heart of the Microsoft .NET architecture. In addition to supporting the .NET initiative, Visual C++ .NET keeps all the productivity-boosting features you're familiar with, such as Edit And Continue, IntelliSense, AutoComplete, and code tips. Visual C++ .NET also includes many new features such as managed code extensions for .NET programming, support for attributed code, and a more consistent development environment. These features take Visual C++ .NET to a new level. This book will get you up to speed on the latest technologies introduced into Visual C++.

.NET, MFC, and ATL

The technology churn we face these days is pretty impressive. We went from no computers on our office desktops to nearly everyone having a computer running MS-DOS in the 1980s to nearly everyone running Microsoft Windows by the mid-1990s. The technology wheel is about to turn again. In the late 1990s, everyone was developing Web sites by hand using tools such as raw Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) DLLs, Java, and Active Server Pages (ASP). In July 2000, Microsoft announced to the world that it would change all that by betting the company on a new technology direction named .NET.

The current thrust of Microsoft is indeed .NET. For a number of years, it's been possible to build a Web site by setting up a server somewhere, getting an IP address, and putting up some content. Anyone with the URL of your site can surf there and check it out. Commercial enterprises have been taking advantage of the Web by posting information that's useful to customers. The Web has also become an invaluable research tool and efficient news broadcast medium.

The computing world of the near future will involve the Web heavily. However, rather than just having human eyeballs look at Web sites, computers themselves will look at Web sites. That is, Web sites will be programmable through Web services. The .NET vision also pushes the responsibility of providing a rich user interface out to the server.

With so much emphasis on Web services and server-based user interfaces, it might seem that standalone applications and client-side user interface scenarios—normally the realm of tools such as the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC)—will be left in the dust. But the need for rich client-side user interfaces is unlikely to go away. Many thought that the advent of the PC and distribution technologies would spell the end of centralized processing on mainframes and minicomputers. It turns out that PCs and distribution technologies only added to the available computing arsenal. The .NET vision of Web services and rich user interfaces provided by the server only adds to the options available to software developers. Rich client-side user interfaces will continue to be viable for many types of applications, running alongside other applications that use other kinds of user interfaces (such as server-generated user interfaces).

MFC is a mature and well-understood technology that's accompanied by a host of third-party extensions. For at least a little while longer, MFC represents the most effective way to write full-featured standalone applications. A good portion of this book will focus on MFC-style development, but we'll also cover Windows Forms—the .NET way to write client-side user interfaces.

Of course, the next question is: Where does this leave COM? COM has solved many problems related to distributed processing, but it has some serious shortcomings—mostly centered around component versioning and type information. Microsoft's .NET vision is based on the common language runtime. The runtime takes the place of COM as the interoperability standard within .NET. We'll cover .NET and the common language runtime in depth in Part VI of this book.

COM and the common language runtime represent different approaches to component architecture, but Microsoft has taken great care to ensure a seamless coexistence. The interoperability path between COM and the runtime is smooth in most cases. Within the .NET world, you probably won't find yourself using COM as a component architecture. However, you might find yourself using Active Template Library (ATL) Server, which is a high-performance means of writing Web sites.

I've updated the coverage of ATL and MFC in this edition of the book because you'll still find it very useful. More important, I'll show you how to leverage your heritage code (sounds better than "legacy code," doesn't it?) as you move into the .NET world.