Making Your Own Custom Control
Ever wondered how to put all of your 500-line code into your own control? Well now there's a way.
Using the Visual Basic 5 Control Creation Edition or Visual Basic 5 (although the CCE is free), you can create your own controls. This has been very beneficial to companies such as Data-Dynamics and Sheridan. They have made a lot of money with their own controls (see my previous article on custom controls).Well, in the next two weeks I will show you a simple demonstration of how to make two different types of controls.
The first will make your program stay 'on top'. Make a new ActiveX control and add a .bas module (Project, Add Module). This first piece of code sets some constants and uses an API call on the 'user32' library. Add this code to the module:
Public Const HWND_TOPMOST = -1 Public Const HWND_NOTOPMOST = -2 Public Const SWP_NOMOVE = &H2 Public Const SWP_NOSIZE = &H1 Public Const SWP_NOACTIVATE = &H10 Public Const SWP_SHOWWINDOW = &H40 Public Const TOPMOST_FLAGS = SWP_NOMOVE Or SWP_NOSIZE Public Declare Function SetWindowPos Lib "user32" _ (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal hWndInsertAfter As Long, _ ByVal x As Long, y, ByVal cx As Long, ByVal cy As Long, _ ByVal wFlags As Long) As Long
Page 1 of 3
This article was originally published on November 20, 2002