By John Lam Object-oriented programming languages have failed to deliver on the promise of truly reusable objects. The vast majority of software developers today fall into the tool consumer category. It's important for new objects that come to market to allow tool-consuming developers to leverage their existing knowledge of how binary objects operate in their programming environments.
Developers get and set properties, call methods, and respond to events.
VBXs mesh perfectly with this scenario and hence their popularity. Although VBXs have made life easier for programmers in the tool consumer category, the tool developer community has not had a good, commercially available set of tools for creating VBXs. The OCX specification was primarily designed to allow developers to create reusable visual binary objects, or controls. In this article, however, we'll show you how to use the nonvisual aspects of OCXs, with an example that acts as a container for an OLE Automation server object. Using an OCX, you can solve some of the problems that plague software developers today.