Making Your Own Custom Control
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.soft.net.uk/domain/
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!
If you would like to discuss any of the points touched upon in this article then please e-mail me at: shuggill@domain.softnet.co.uk or check my web site at: http://www.soft.net.uk/domain/. If you would like to subscribe to my FREE weekly VB newsletter then send an e-mail with the subject line of 'subscribe'.
Thanks for reading
Sam Huggill
Page 3 of 3
This article was originally published on November 20, 2002