Essential IDL: Interface Design for COM (The DevelopMentor Series)

Definition Language (IDL), is an essential topic for all programmers working with COM. Essential IDL offers these programmers a detailed yet accessible description of IDL and its application to COM development projects. The book presents all of the various IDL constructs and offers insight into their purpose and function in interface definitions. In particular,Essential IDL focuses on IDL constructs that support the efficient marshalling of data as performed by the COM interception layer. Taking a top-down approach, this book opens with the basics of defining interfaces and then details data types, pointers and arrays, aliasing, and IDL support for asynchronous COM. Numerous examples of both server-side and client-side programming illustrate concepts and techniques throughout the book. Readers will learn about such key topics as:

• Generating type information
• Building proxy-stub DLLs
• Local and remote interfaces
• Primitive, enumerated, and user-defined data types
• Interface inheritance
• Top-level versus embedded pointers
• Object references and pointers
• Fixed arrays, conformant arrays, and SAFEARRAYS
• Multi-dimensional conformant pointers
• Method and type aliasing
• Asynchronous calls
• Client-side and server-side asynchrony