Printable View
In an earlier thread I answered a question about rotating a font, and posted a control I'd made that does it. I've recently updated the control to add property pages and expose events. If you're interested, here's the zip of the ocx. Tell me what you think.
It's a very nice control. How do you make such controls? Do you paint onto a picture box? Or on to the main control? I wish I could learn how to make editable controls.
When you start a new project in VB, there's an option for creating an "ActiveX Control". That's what these things are. It lets you make up the special controls. They're not really hard to make. There's even an ActiveX Control Interface Wizard (got to the Add-Ins menu, hit Add-In Manager, and then check the box beside the wizard) that will do all the work for you. You can use that to see how it puts something together. I don't use it though because I don't like how it names variables and such. There's a wizard for property pages as well, which I did use here because I wanted the standard color and font things, and based on your properties it knows what controls to stick into it.
In this one, the control itself it just a blank usercontrol face that I paint the text onto directly with the TextOut() API. There are no other controls short of the UC itself. That cuts down on the size of the control a bit, and since as usercontrol has its own hDC, I had something to draw the text to.
Thanks for mentioning that wizard thing. I'm gonna check it out. I already knew about the ActiveX control because I've made a few from www.vb-world.net. I just didn't know what they were doing, and couldn't figure it out from the little code they had. I've made an always on top control. which I like, and a hide taskbar control, which isn't very usefull :rolleyes: Thanks again.