Share via


Introduction to ATL

 

The new home for Visual Studio documentation is Visual Studio 2017 Documentation on docs.microsoft.com.

The latest version of this topic can be found at Introduction to ATL.

ATL is the Active Template Library, a set of template-based C++ classes with which you can easily create small, fast Component Object Model (COM) objects. It has special support for key COM features including: stock implementations of IUnknown, IClassFactory, IClassFactory2, and IDispatch; dual interfaces; standard COM enumerator interfaces; connection points; tear-off interfaces; and ActiveX controls.

ATL code can be used to create single-threaded objects, apartment-model objects, free-threaded model objects, or both free-threaded and apartment-model objects.

Topics covered in this section include:

See Also

Introduction to COM and ATL