January 10, 1997
Welcome to this Web-based tutorial for the ActiveX Tutorial Samples. From this overview page you can jump to read the tutorial lessons for the various tutorial code samples.
The ActiveX Tutorial Samples cover the foundations of ActiveX technology. The COM (Component Object Model) technology is the primary foundation for ActiveX technology. For example, all ActiveX controls are COM Component Objects. These tutorial samples concentrate on COM technology early in the sequence and progress to cover ActiveX components in the context of web applications.
This tutorial sample series is directed to serve foundation-level ActiveX programmers who are developing web applications using their proficiency in C++ Win32 programming. If you are developing internet web applications with ActiveX controls and an integrated development environment like Microsoft Developer Studio, then you have the benefit of tools and abstractions that hide most of the technical detail covered in this series. The series exposes much of the infastructure that is now being increasingly hidden by MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and ATL (ActiveX Template Library). This series can help when you need to drop below the convenient abstractions in MFC or ATL to perform ActiveX/COM-compliant modifications. Of course, it can also help if you are working directly at this foundation level of ActiveX programming to develop the highest performance professional web applications.
These source code samples are the same as those currently found as branch \MSSDK\SAMPLES\OLE\COM of the installed Microsoft Win32 Platform SDK. All source for these code samples is in C++. Neither MFC nor ATL is used.
The installed branch consists of directories organized in a graduated sequence of tutorial lessons. The numbered order of lessons is the sequence we recommend that you follow in the tutorial. Each lesson illustrates a major feature of COM and ActiveX technology. Most lessons build on the ones that came earlier in the sequence.
Each code sample has an associated description of the sample's external operation and a narrative code tour of the internal construction (based on the specific goal of the tutorial lesson). This tutorial narrative resides in a [lesson].HTM web page file--where [lesson] is the name of the lesson/code sample. There is one of these narrative HTML files for each tutorial code sample. All of these HTML files are located in the main directory of the tutorial samples branch. The complete tutorial is thus made up of many HTML files located in the parent directory of all the sample directories. This single parent directory is the main tutorial directory. Additional details on the internal mechanisms of each sample can be found in code comments in each source file located in the sample's directory.
The tutorial HTML files for the tutorial samples are linked together into a web that can be viewed with a web browser. The tutorial is aimed at revealing representative coding techniques and the internal behavior of the sample components. While this can serve as an inductive means to learn ActiveX and COM architectural theory, this tutorial complements other more comprehensive works that cover the full conceptual breadth of ActiveX, COM, and OLE technology. Three recommended works are:
After installing the complete sample set, you can start browsing this tutorial by executing the TUTORIAL.EXE command in the main tutorial directory. You must have a web browser compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer installed for TUTORIAL.EXE to work. If you are reading this web page on the World Wide Web then you can download the complete sample set to obtain the source code for the samples that accompany the tutorial as well as the web pages that comprise the tutorial.
Click a link below:
List of Lessons -- table of
contents for the tutorial lessons.
About the Samples -- useful
information about building the code samples, extracting individual code
samples, and coding style conventions.