ATL Internals, 2e, available for pre-order

ATL Internals, 2e, this time with ATL 8, is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. For those wondering what the world needs with such a book, I refer you to the preface:

.NET has hit the Windows programmer community like a tornado, tipping over the trailer homes of the ways that we used to do things. It’s pretty much swept up the needs of most web applications and service applications, as well of most of the line-of-business applications for which we previously used Visual Basic and MFC.

However, a few stubborn hold-outs in their root cellars will give up their native code only at the end of a gun. These are the folks with years of investment in C++ code who don’t trust some new-fangled compiler switches to make their native code “managed.” Those folks won’t ever move their code, whether there are benefits to be gained or not. This book is partially for them, if they can be talked into moving their ATL 3/Visual C++ 6 projects forward to ATL 8 and Visual Studio 2005.

Another class of developers that inhabit downtown Windows city aren’t touched by tornados and barely notice them when they happen. These are the ones shipping applications that have to run fast and well on Windows 95 on up, that don’t have the CPU or the memory to run a .NET application or the bandwidth to download the .NET Framework even if they wanted to. These are the ones who also have to squeeze the maximum out of server machines, to take advantage of every resource that’s available. These are the ones who don’t have the luxury of the CPU, memory or storage resources provided by the clear weather of modern machines needed for garbage collection, just-in-time compilation, or a giant class library filled with things they don’t need. These developers value load time, execution speed, and direct access to the platform in rain, sleet, or dark of night. For them, any framework they use must have a strict policy when it comes to zero-overhead for features they don’t use, maximum flexibility for customization, and hard-core performance. For these developers, there’s ATL 8, the last, best native framework for the Windows platform.