Understanding Strings In COM

After some study and direct experimentation, the various string types in COM prove to be much less cryptic and problematic than at first they seemed. Fundamentally, it all boils down to recognizing and memorizing a handful of new data types which may behave differently on different platforms, and getting used to the framework of handy conversion functions provided by ATL, MFC, or the Direct To COM Visual C++ extension. Regardless of which of the mentioned tasks you are going to tackle, I hope this article will serve as a valuable aid in saving precious time working with strings.