Visual Basic Concepts
The Component Tools Guide is a suite of guides designed to help you create and use components that interoperate through the open, extensible standard on which ActiveX™ is based: the Component Object Model (COM).
By virtue of this standard, you can design applications from components that communicate through a common set of interfaces — and do it with the speed and ease of use you've become accustomed to with Microsoft® Visual Basic®.
Each of the sections included in the Component Tools Guide covers a different aspect of designing with components — from using existing software to creating your own, from ActiveX controls to DLLs, from the Visual Basic development environment to the Internet.
|Using ActiveX Controls |
An introduction to the ActiveX controls included with the Visual Basic Professional Edition. Start here for general information, scenarios of real-life uses, and code.
|Creating ActiveX Components |
A guide to creating ActiveX controls, ActiveX documents, and ActiveX code components. Includes introductory step by step chapters as well as in-depth design guides.
|Extending the Visual Basic Environment with Add-Ins |
A guide to using the Visual Basic extensibility object model to tailor the development environment to your unique needs. Use objects in the model to build add-ins that automate repetitive tasks, monitor the development environment for certain events, or perform complex tasks.
|Accessing DLLs and the Windows API |
A guide to enhancing functionality provided Visual Basic by calling functions in dynamic-link libraries (DLLs). Through DLLs, you can access the thousands of procedures that form the backbone of the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as routines written in other languages.
|Building Internet Applications |
An introduction to creating applications that can run on the Internet or an intranet, presenting HTML pages inside forms-based applications, and deploying these applications and other ActiveX components on the Web.