BUG: BackColor Property of OCX Control Saved in Decimal

• Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Editions of Microsoft Visual Basic, 16-bit and 32-bit, for Windows, version 4.0

SYMPTOMS

The BackColor property of OCX controls is saved in Decimal format inside Form files. This is contrary to the format stored for Forms, which saves its BackColor property in a Hexadecimal format.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be an issue in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. Microsoft is researching this issue and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

WORKAROUND

There is no workaround to prevent Visual Basic from saving the BackColor properties of OCX controls in a Decimal format. However, any program that parses the text Form files detects whether the number is in a Hexadecimal format since Hexadecimal numbers are preceded by an ampersand (&) character.

MORE INFORMATION

Although the BackColor property of OCX controls is saved in a Decimal format, it is displayed as Hexadecimal.

Steps To Reproduce Problem

1. Start a new project in Visual Basic 4.0. Form1 is created by default.

2. Change the BackColor property of Form1 to any color other than the default gray.

3. Place a Sheridan Panel control on Form1. Change its BackColor property

       to the same color you chose for Form1.
   

4. From the File menu, select Save File As to save the Form.

5. Open the form file in Notepad or another text editor. Note that the BackColor property of the Form is saved in Hexadecimal format and the BackColor property of the control is saved in a Decimal format.