This release of the ActiveX Designer Software Development Kit (SDK) contains new registry keys, interfaces, services, and ambient properties that provide greater flexibility, better integration with host applications, and improved performance.
With this version of the ActiveX Designer SDK, users can create customized objects that are public. These customized objects can then be registered using the new DllRegisterDesigner, DllUnregisterDesigner, and IDesignerRegistration APIs. See Chapter 8, "Registering, Licensing, and Upgrading an ActiveX Designer," for a description of these registration features.
You can now request that the host delay connecting event sources and sinks until they're actually needed, instead of immediately on startup. Delaying this step can improve performance, especially in designers that require many connections. When you support this feature, you do not have to implement IConnectionPoint and IConnectionPointContainer; instead, you implement the new IActiveDesignerRuntime interface and call the host's IActiveDesignerRuntimeSite interface.
See Chapter 3, "Supporting ActiveX and COM Interfaces," and the descriptions of the IActiveDesignerRuntime and IActiveDesignerRuntimeSite interfaces for details.
To work with Visual Basic 6.0 or in the Visual Basic Environment (VBE), all designers must support aggregation.
This release of the ActiveX Designer SDK allows designers to add icons to the host's toolbox, through the IDesignerToolbox interface and the SDesignerToolboxSite service. In addition, Visual Basic now supports a number of ambient properties specifically related to designers.
See Chapter 4, "Interaction Between the ActiveX Designer and Its Host," for a description of these features.
You can now retain designer-specific data through a run-time session by using the IDesignerDebugging interface. This interface allows a designer to pass data to its run-time instance and back to a design-time instance. For example, you might need to retain the name of a file to delete after a debugging session.
See Chapter 8, "Registering, Licensing, and Upgrading an ActiveX Designer," for more information on this feature.
This release of the ActiveX Designer SDK includes support for the new \DesignerFeatures and \DesignerToolbox registry keys. Under the \DesignerFeatures key, a designer can indicate the type of run-time objects to create and the support it requires from the host. Under the \DesignerToolbox key, a designer can specify items to add to the host's toolbox.
See Chapter 11, "Registry Reference," for details.