Microsoft announced ActiveX as the replacement for Object Linking and Embedding, and for months afterward hardly anyone outside the company could get an ActiveX control to work. Now Visual Basic 5.0 Custom Control Edition opens the ActiveX world to the estimated 2 million Visual Basic programmers-novices and experts. This standalone product was designed to make ActiveX controls work with the Visual Basic language and development environment. Microsoft plans to bundle it with the full Visual Basic 5.0 Standard, Professional and Enterprise Editions to be released later in 1997. To build a control, you place control objects on a form, write some VB code and compile into a control.
Simple ones take less than an hour.
Complex ones take longer, but the language is easy to understand and use even for novice programmers. The development environment is similar to VB 4.0, so experienced VB developers will feel right at home. There are more than 20 standard controls from which you assemble your custom control. Each has the usual selectable properties and events to give your control an initial state. Rough spots Your custom control can be constructed with any feature found in an ordinary VB application, such as multiple forms, pushbuttons, check boxes and data sources.