Check out this illustration of the functions of COM Single Thread Apartment (STA), Multithread Apartment (MTA), and ATL Auto-thread Module with a testing client-server application.
Latest Apartments & Threading Articles
Understanding COM Apartments, Part I
In the first part of a two-part series on COM apartments, Jeff Prosise describes what apartments are, why they exist, and how to avoid the problems that they introduce.
Understanding COM Apartments, Part II
In the completion of his two-part series on understanding COM apartments, Jeff Prosise illustrates why the lessons learned in last month's discussion of COM apartments are so important by giving concrete examples of how this knowledge can help you develop better and more efficient COM applications.
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MFC Integration with the Windows Transactional File System (TxF)
The Transactional File System (TxF), which allows access to an NTFS file system to be conducted in a transacted manner through extensions to the Windows SDK API. MFC 10, has been extended to support TxF and related technologies. This support allows existing MFC applications to be easily extended to support kernel transactions.
.NET Framework: Collections and Generics
The original release of the .NET Framework included collections as .NET was introduced to the Microsoft programming world. The .NET Framework 2.0 introduced generics to complement the System.Collections namespace and provide a more efficient and well performing option. Read on to learn more...

Working with Hashtables in .NET
There are millions of Namespaces in the .NET Framework. Coming from a VB 6 background, I was accustomed to arrays and arrays only. Luckily all has changed with .NET, in that the .NET Framework supports Collections, which as its name implies, is a collection of objects that you can store in a certain manner.
Implementing a WCF Message Contract
WCF implementations normally take two different approaches; a Document style or an API style. Document style implementations are more flexible and often easier to extend and version. Also, Document style or rather, Message Contract service implementations, work well between systems with a shared message assembly. Jeffrey Juday guides you through architecting a WCF Message Contract implementation.