Make Your Own Control

Make your own control: Part 2

This article continues from my last article "Making Your Own Control: Part 1".

So, you have made your own control which keeps your program on top, but now you want people to know that it was you that made it. Your claim to fame!

Well, as last time, load Visual Basic and choose "ActiveX Control" from the New Project dialog. Open up the code window for the control and go to the General Declarations procedure. Add this code which declares your name and web site address as a string:

Private mvarauthor As String  
Private mvarURL As String

Now add these four pieces of code which store and retrieve the settings:

Public Property Let URL(ByVal vData As String) 
  mvarURL = vData 
End Property  

Public Property Get URL() As String 
  URL = mvarURL 
End Property  

Public Property Let author(ByVal vData As String) 
  mvarauthor = vData 
End Property  

Public Property Get author() As String 
  author = mvarauthor 
End Property

Now add two labels to the control, and change the caption properties on each one to your name and web site address. e.g.

Lblname.caption="Sam Huggill"  
LblURL.caption="http://www.vbsquare.com/"

Almost finished. Open the code window for the control and go to the controls Initialise procedure and add this code:

Private Sub UserControl_Initialize()  
  Me.author = lblName.Caption  
  Me.URL = lblURL.Caption  
End Sub

Now click File, Make Project1.ocx. Select a directory for the file. Now, make a new project and click Project, Components. Click browse, go to the directory where the file is. Double click on the file and click OK. Draw the control onto the form and look at the properties. See, it works!

Make Your Own Control - Part 2