ActiveX Programming

ActiveX Programming
ActiveX is the successor to OLE, and it's the technology that facilitates communication
between applications at the object level, enabling you to embed a Word document in an
Excel spreadsheet or to embed any of hundreds of kinds of objects in any ActiveX
application. ActiveX chapters include Chapters 13, "ActiveX Concepts," 14, "Building an
ActiveX Container Application," 15, "Building an ActiveX Server Application," 16,
"Building an Automation Server," and 17, "Building an ActiveX Control."
The Internet
Microsoft recognizes that distributed computing, in which work is shared between two
or more computers, is becoming more and more common. Programs need to talk to each
other, people need to send messages across a LAN or around the world, and MFC has
classes that support these kinds of communication. The four Internet chapters in this

book are Chapter 18, "Sockets, MAPI, and the Internet," Chapter 19, "Internet
Programming with the WinInet Classes," Chapter 20, "Building an Internet ActiveX
Control," and Chapter 21, "The Active Template Library."
Database Access
Database programming keeps getting easier. ODBC, Microsoft's Open DataBase
Connectivity package, enables your code to call API functions that access a huge
variety of database files - Oracle, DBase, an Excel spreadsheet, a plain text file, old
legacy mainframe systems using SQL, whatever! You call a standard name function, and
the API provided by the database vendor or a third party handles the translation. The
details are in Chapters 22, "Database Access," and 23, "SQL and the Enterprise Edition."