Replacing ActiveX Controls with Windows Forms Controls

Chapter 19

Replacing ActiveX Controls with Windows Forms Controls

If you ve been using Microsoft Visual Basic long enough since before Visual Basic 4, to be exact you will have fond memories of upgrading your controls from one control model to another: from VBX to OCX. When Visual Basic pole-vaulted to 32 bits, VBX short for Visual Basic extension controls didn t make it over the bar and were left behind. Visual Basic 4 32-Bit Edition offered OCX short for OLE control extension replacements for most of the VBX controls delivered with Visual Basic 4 16-Bit Edition. In order to move your Visual Basic application to 32 bits, you were forced to upgrade your VBX controls to OCX controls. Visual Basic 4 provided a feature that would automatically replace the VBX controls in your project with equivalent OCX controls commonly referred to as ActiveX controls today.

Visual Basic .NET offers a new control model called Windows Forms controls. Although there are many Windows Forms controls that are equivalent to the ActiveX controls you find in Visual Basic 6, you are not forced to replace all of your ActiveX controls with Windows Forms equivalents; Visual Basic .NET supports ActiveX controls as is. In fact, as we discussed in Chapter 13, the Upgrade Wizard except in limited situations does not replace your ActiveX controls with equivalent Windows Forms controls, even when equivalent controls exist.

This chapter discusses how you can manually replace your ActiveX controls with equivalent Windows Forms controls. In addition, it discusses the benefits of making this transition.