Designing DLLs for Multiple Client Applications (103210)

SUMMARY

This is a companion article to "Designing DLLs for Multiple Client Applications, Part 1: Strategy," also available on the Microsoft Developer Network CD. That article discusses various strategies for allowing Microsoft Windows dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) to provide services to multiple client applications.

This article describes how the associated Grocery Shopper sample application implements some of the client-server strategies described in Part 1. It begins with an overview of the sample application's architecture, and then proceeds to analyze how the application programming interface (API) is implemented, how the DLL manages multiple clients, and how information hiding is enforced. Among the features of the sample code are registration and deregistration APIs, enumeration callbacks, delayed resource allocation, and custom event-notification messages.