Active Template Library (ATL) Tutorial
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 Active Template Library (ATL) Tutorial.
ATL is designed to simplify the process of creating efficient, flexible, lightweight controls. This tutorial leads you through the creation of an ActiveX control, demonstrating many ATL and COM fundamentals.
By following this tutorial, you will learn how to add a control to an ATL project that draws a circle and a filled polygon. You will then add a property to indicate how many sides the polygon will have and create drawing code for updating the control when the property changes. The control will then be displayed on a Web page using some VBScript to make it respond to events.
The tutorial is divided into seven steps. You should perform each step in order as later steps depend on previously completed tasks. Before you begin, you should confirm that you have privileges required to register an ActiveX component on your particular computer. This is usually only a concern if you are running Visual Studio .NET over a Terminal Services connection.