Making Your Own Custom Control

November 20, 2002
By Sam Huggill

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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

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