This document is organized as follows:
Chapter 1, "Overview of ActiveX Designers," provides an overview of ActiveX designers and how they fit with related technologies.
Chapter 2, "Using ActiveX Designers with Visual Basic," describes how ActiveX designers work in the Visual Basic host environment. Visual Basic 5.0 is the initial host for ActiveX designers.
Chapter 3, "Designing and Implementing an ActiveX Designer," outlines what you must implement to create an ActiveX designer.
Chapter 4, "Supporting ActiveX Interfaces," outlines the OLE and ActiveX interfaces required for ActiveX designers to support in-place activation, OLE objects, events, and properties.
Chapter 5, "Type Information and Extended Objects," discusses static and dynamic type information and extended objects.
Chapter 6, "Services," describes the service architecture and tells how to use services.
Chapter 7, "Retaining Persistent Data and Saving the Run-Time Object," explains how to save the persistent data you'll need for the visual designer and the run-time object. It also covers the IActiveDesigner interface, which provides information about the run-time object.
Chapter 8, "Registering, Licensing, and Upgrading an ActiveX Designer," covers issues related to licensing and creating multiple versions of ActiveX designers, and tells how to register these objects in the system-wide registry.
Chapter 9, "API Reference," is a reference to the APIs that are specific to ActiveX designers.
Chapter 10, "Service Reference," describes the services ActiveX designers can use.
Note
The interface syntax in this book follows the variable-naming convention known as Hungarian notation, invented by programmer Charles Simonyi. Variables are prefixed with lowercase letters indicating their data type. For example, lpszNewDocname signifies a long pointer to a zero-terminated string named NewDocname. For information on Hungarian notation, see Programming Windows by Charles Petzold.