To make an ActiveX control or use the WebBrowser Control?

Hello everybody,

This is my second, er third post here. I'm excited to see such a vibrant forum on VB. I hope I can make some worthwhile contributions in the future. Let me say thanks ahead of time for taking time out to read my long explanation. It seems like I can never give any easy questions (I hope I can be proven wrong on that), so please be patient with me.

Anyway, before I start with my real dilemma and why I'm hanging on a certain-side of the tree, I thought I should strike up a talk about my core problem and why I choose my direction. I hope maybe I can get some other perspectives and maybe steer my thinking into better direction.

And, I'm using VB6.

The first problem I ran into, like many coders, is that I didn't like the ActiveX controls that I had to work with. So, make my own, right? Right. And then there was the scroll-bar. Not one, but three different scroll-bars to choose from. Great I need to use one of those...and none of them work. There is some quirky glitch with every single one of them. (Swear Words!) So I make this very nice, complicated ActiveX control. It has a vertically-growing page layout, hence I need to adjust the scrollbar for calculations. Math-no problem. But that %&$! scroll-bar acts so stupid it make my control look dumb!

Ok, I re-do this control, from the ground up. WHY!? I realized afterwards thats didn't need to do that. But, I've redesigned this control from the ground up three times now, and it still doesn't work! That was it! No more ActiveX controls where I need to use a scroll bar due to an ever-changing page layout. I've got a better idea: WebBrowser Control.

So I had a team member redo my control in XHTML 1.0 Strict, using javascript, CSS, the works. It was great. No math on resizing controls, I could style with fonts and colors, the works. I let the browser do-all-the HTML positioning work for me. AWESOME!

But, there's another problem. If I want to load a special webpage, like an MHT or an pre-defined (I mean correctly defined) web page like XHTML 1.0 strict, I can't use the Document control to change it into an XHTML 1.0 Strict. I'm stuck with whatever IE gives me. Instead I can only get my new pre-defined page two ways: from a networked URL address or a file path, meaning I have to save the file and then upload (as opposed to just injecting the browser with a pre-made string). Well, I see myself liking the browser so much, I decided to see if Mozilla's ActiveX control could have pre-injected web-pages...nope, it can't. So, I think, hmm maybe I should build an http engine where it's intention is to interface directly with the web-browser control.

Now I stop and think. I take a look back at the custom made ActiveX control and the scrollbars. Am I really going down the right path? Should I revisit the scrollbar thing again, or is there another way.

Thanks again for taking the time to read all of this. I'm really excited to hear from you all and what you might suggest.


Note: Please don't say "redo it in VB.NET" This is a MAJOR project. It's been in the development for almost 4 years now. I need to develop items with-in a a couple weeks/months time. It will take me at least a full year to recode my entire project into VB.NET; it's very integrated so I have to do the WHOLE project. I cannot really use VB.NET for my solution.