Overview
The book is aimed at experienced Visual Basic programmers who want to be able to create their own controls. Web developers who are comfortable with VBScript will also be able to work through the book.In this book, we'll take you from an overview of Visual Basic 5 Control Creation Edition, right up to how you create your own, highly customized controls, explaining the sructure and techniques involved.
First, we'll take a detailed view of the general requirements for any control. After that, each chapter will show you how we build different types of control. These include a simple sub-classed list box control based on the standard Windows ComboBox, an aggregate control which provides a complete name and address input area in a single control, and a pair of controls which, together, allow you to create all kinds of card games quickly--even in a Web page. We'll also look at data-bound controls, which can link the information they display directly to an ODBC data source, such as an Access database.
Finally we'll illustrate the technique of creating a control from scratch, using the Windows API, by developing a custom slider control. We'll also take a look at the issues you need to be aware of once you've created your controls. You'll see how easy it is to package and distribute your controls--either as part of your applications, as individual controls, or even the Internet as part of a Web page.