Adding an ActiveX Designer to the Development Environment

To add an ActiveX designer to the development environment, an end user takes these steps:

1. Clicks Components on the Project menu to open the Components dialog box.
   
   
2. Clicks the Designers tab in the Components dialog box.
   
   
3. Selects one or more ActiveX designers, as shown in the following figure, and clicks OK.

To find out which ActiveX designers are available, Visual Basic searches the system registry for entries that specify the ActiveX designer component category. Using the class identifiers (CLSIDs) and strings of these entries, it creates the list of ActiveX designers in the Components dialog box. Note that your installation may list different designers from those in the figure. The end user selects one or more ActiveX designers from the box. The first four selected designers subsequently appear on the Project menu; Visual Basic lists additional designers when the user selects the More ActiveX Designers menu item.

In addition, a designer can use the DesignerFeatures registry subkey to request host support for various features, such as delayed event sinking and the creation of public objects. After Visual Basic creates the list of ActiveX designers, it checks the designer features flags. If an ActiveX designer requires support that Visual Basic cannot provide, Visual Basic does not include the designer in the Components dialog box.