Make Your Own Control – Part 2

This article continues from my last article "Making Your Own Control:
Part 1".

So, you have made your own control which keeps your program on top, but now you want
people to know that it was you that made it. Your claim to fame!

Well, as last time, load
Visual Basic and choose "ActiveX Control" from the New Project
dialog. Open up the code window for the control and go to the General
Declarations procedure. Add this code which declares your name and web
site address as a string:

Private mvarauthor As String  
Private mvarURL As String  

Now add these four pieces of
code which store and retrieve the settings:

Public Property Let URL(ByVal vData As String) 
  mvarURL = vData 
End Property  

Public Property Get URL() As String 
  URL = mvarURL 
End Property  

Public Property Let author(ByVal vData As String) 
  mvarauthor = vData 
End Property  

Public Property Get author() As String 
  author = mvarauthor 
End Property  

Now add two labels to the
control, and change the caption properties on each one to your name and
web site address. e.g.

Lblname.caption="Sam Huggill"  
LblURL.caption="http://www.vbsquare.com/"

Almost finished. Open the code
window for the control and go to the controls Initialise procedure and
add this code:

Private Sub UserControl_Initialize()  
  Me.author = lblName.Caption  
  Me.URL = lblURL.Caption  
End Sub

Now click File, Make
Project1.ocx. Select a directory for the file. Now, make a new project
and click Project, Components. Click browse, go to the directory where
the file is. Double click on the file and click OK. Draw the control
onto the form and look at the properties. See, it works!