Microsoft Corporation
November 1996
The Visual Basic® 5.0 Control Creation Edition is the newest version of the Visual Basic programming system, the world's most popular rapid application development tool. The Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition allows developers to build ActiveX™ controls quickly and easily, opening up Web development to the over three million Visual Basic developers in the industry today. The Control Creation Edition will join the Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Edition when version 5.0 becomes available.
The Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition allows developers to quickly and easily create ActiveX controls. ActiveX controls can be created using any of the scenarios below:
ActiveX controls created by the Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition can be included in any application that supports ActiveX controls, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Visual Basic 4.0 applications, Microsoft Office 97, and Netscape Navigator via plug-ins.
The Control Creation Edition includes the new intelligent code editor, forms engine, and interactive debugger of Visual Basic 5.0, but does not include some of the functionality found in the fully-featured Standard, Professional and Enterprise editions of Visual Basic, such as Crystal Reports, Source Safe, and other third-party products. In addition, while Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition will provide support for programming and compiling ActiveX controls, it cannot be used to develop standalone applications. The Control Creation Edition will join the Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Edition when version 5.0 becomes available.
All VBA licensees will become ActiveX control hosts. VBA is the language engine at the heart of Visual Basic Control Creation Edition (VBCCE), Office 97, and third party licensees.
Visual J++™, Control Creation Edition, and VC++® all can create ActiveX components. Control Creation Edition is the only tool of the three that applies visual Rapid Applications Development (RAD) techniques to creating controls. Visual InterDev™ is a run time environment for creating dynamic, interactive web sites. ActiveX components will be critical components in those solutions.
ActiveX is a set of technologies that integrate software components in a networked environment, regardless of the language in which they were created. This integration of components enables content and software developers to easily create interactive applications and Web sites. As a leading commercial object model, ActiveX has been widely adopted by corporate MIS and ISV communities and is used by millions of application and content developers today.
ActiveX technology makes it easy to create, integrate, and reuse software components or "controls" over the Internet or intranets. An ActiveX control is a software component that can be integrated into Web pages, Microsoft Office, Access, Visual Basic, and any host that supports ActiveX controls. With ActiveX, developers can create components in any programming language, integrate them with any scripting language, and run those components from any type of application—including Web browsers—as well as many of the world's most popular business applications. Assembling Web sites from a wide variety of existing software components speeds time to market, allows Web site producers to build more engaging and effective sites, and results in a more intriguing and productive experience for Web surfers.
Visual Basic Control Creation Edition allows you to create very powerful controls. Some of the available features that you can take advantage of in your controls are:
Yes. The controls produced by the Visual Basic Control Creation Edition fully conform to the new ActiveX Control Framework, making them ideally suited for Internet transmissions.
Controls produced by Visual Basic Control Creation Edition are compiled to pCode, producing very small but very powerful controls.
We expect to release a beta version of Visual Basic 5.0 in Q4, 1996, and commercially release the 1.0 version in Q1, 1997.