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 version 5.0 is the initial host for ActiveX designers.
Chapter 3, "Supporting ActiveX and COM Interfaces," outlines the COM, OLE, and ActiveX interfaces required for ActiveX designers to support in-place activation, OLE objects, events, and properties.
Chapter 4, "Interaction Between the ActiveX Designer and Its Host," describes interfaces in the host for use by ActiveX designers, and features through which an ActiveX designer can change the host environment.
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, "Persisting, Saving, and Debugging an ActiveX Designer," explains how to save the persistent data you'll need for the visual designer and the run-time object. It also covers optional designer interfaces that provide information about the run-time object and help in debugging.
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," lists APIs that are specific to ActiveX designers.
Chapter 10, "Service Reference," describes the services ActiveX designers can use.
Chapter 11, "Registry Reference," describes the registration keys for ActiveX designers.
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.