Making Your Own Custom Control

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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

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