[VB6] Rocketdock Settings Enhancement

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Well, bar one bug I have finished the tool and it works in all respects just as I planned it. I am rather pleased. I encountered a rather unexpected and for me a large stumbling block with regard to the packaging of the utility as described above.

As we all know VB6 projects often utilise objects called OCXs. For those that don't know these are packaged libraries of functionality that provide additional functions to your program such as common dialog boxes (file open/save) or treeviews to your GUI or similar. These OCXs are bound to your program and are required to be present and 'registered' on the target system. This wasn't a problem when VB6 was young as I believe all or the majority of windows machines had these OCXs available and present - but as time has gone on, the later versions of Windows may not have them, might have a different version but they certainly won't be registered.

So there is the problem. How to bundle the OCXs with my binary and have them automatically placed - correctly into C:\windows\system32 for 64bit systems or C:\windows\sysWOW64 for 32bit systems - and then registered using administrator rights. I have looked for packagers that understand VB6's specific requirements (with no luck or they cost good money), I have tried creating SxS or side by side manifests (another bad solution provided by MS) that always seems to fail due to one thing or another. I've spent spent hours on this and all I want to do is to package my binary...

In the end I gave up on all that, brought out an old tool I have in my arsenal - setup2go, a fully-functional free packager with a decent GUI that does all that I want.



In addition I wrote my own VB6 tool for dealing with OCX distribution and registration. That is what I am testing now. A little more testing and I'll have it finished soon and my VB6 project will be complete and available for download. I expect that as many as four to five people will download it per week... if I'm lucky.



My OCX registration tool - first cut - no nonsense.

I'll have to find some good places to distribute it. In truth, the number of users does not really matter. For me it was a technical challenge to free up the brain cells, to learn new techniques and see how well an old technology is suited to resolving current day problems. In one sense I also created it purely for myself to keep Rocketdock usable under Windows 7/10 today and in the future.



The splash screen shown during installation.

The next step is to migrate the exact same design to VB.NET and to learn the perils and pitfalls of that process, going from a cosy place to an unknown one. When I was a Project Manager I managed people to do this sort of thing for me but without ever really going through it on a technical basis myself. Now I am doing the technical role, I can appreciate how complex design and coding really was.

-oOo-



I've added some right-click menu options to the icon map allowing you to assign various functions to pre-selected icon images. I am also adding the same selection options to the icon target selection button.

In addition, if the user closes the utility with the Rocketdock map showing, the map state is remembered when the tool is re-opened. Just a few minor improvements but these little changes make all the difference.

-oOo-

I've removed the need for one of the additional OCX files, the one that provides the rich-text control used for the licence display and auto-generated software list. Instead of rich-text boxes I now use a simple listbox which is part of core VB6 and thus does not require this additional functionality. It means that one of the external dependencies has been removed. I aim to remove the remainder of the required OCXs but that will be more difficult than you might expect and might take a while.

I am working on the thumbnail display (top right) to make it act more like its Explorer counterpart with regard to keyboard presses.