This problem has been driving me completely nuts.

I have a sort of odd situation I am dealing with. I use a telnet client that uses windows scripting to build scripts in VBscript, Perlscript and Javascript. The problem is that while the client supports most features of the scripting engines, it does not act as an actual document container. So I am trying to design a small VB activex program to get around this.

The idea is to provide only a blank form with no pre-defined objects. I would then use something like this to create an object and add it to the form:

dim temp as object
set temp = createobject("textbox")

However, this doesn't quite work, since the brain trusts at MS decided not to allow access to some things like the Multiline property of textboxes and richtextboxes at run time. And there are bound to be others.

I need some way to get around this limitation, since the idea is to provide a floating window that exists outside the client for stuff like seperating out certain lines of incoming text, showing a picture, hosting a spreadsheet, etc. Eventually I am considering actually providing a way to place multiple object on the form, using something similar to the form definition files used by the VB compiler to define it. All actually processing code beyond initial displaying, redrawing and other such things being handled by the script that instantiated the object. What I don't want is to have to use HTML and the Infernal Exploder core dlls to provide what seems to be the only available document container for doing such a thing. And there are such wonderful resources explaining how such containers work and how to build your own that I am sure it would only take me till Windows 3000 to figure it out.... lol

In theory my blank form would let me provide a simple way to display any kind of object, including other activex components not available at compile time, such as video streams and the like. However, unless I can find a way to set those unsettable properties before using an object, I am out of luck. I really don't want to have to limit supported object to only those I know are available on all systems.

All I have been able to come up with is 'maybe' being able to instantiate the objects in the client script and pass the resulting object to my program. VBscript should allow access to all properties, unless 'set' also binds it in vbscript, which is likely. I have been a bit reluctant to try it, since the results could prove very unpredictable and I am not at all sure it is something that can even be done.

Any ideas?