I am looking for an OCX control that will work with VB6 and is capable of producing a grid like the one below.
Any ideas?
ComponentOne still makes a suite of ActiveX controls for VB6. Their VSFlexGridPro is very flexible (pun intended).
After surveying the 3rd party market, I could not find a single ActiveX control that could pivot data in a flexible manner. Ended up using DevExpress XtraPivotGrid for .NET via Interop.
Related
I'm looking for an explanation as to what I can and can't do as well as advantages and disadvantages to using Visual Studio for coding instead of the built in text editor in Excel.
From my perspective
Use VBA editor (VBE) if you
develop ad-hoc apps for yourself, friends
are the only one who works on a project
mainly works with the Office object model - no communicating with System, Web, database etc.
don't use source control (Note: Rubberduck is here to help if you do so)
don't include too many dlls from the Reference form
don't want to learn new platform (.NET)
Note, I did all the above and I could live with just VBA for long time without too many problems and in a few ways VBA is much better than VSTO e.g. in debugging (here I mean, you can change almost everything when you are debugging VBA and you'll be still able to continue, there is no way to do the same in VSTO)
Use VSTO if you
want to better support for System, Web, XML, database tasks. NET is
much more better especially if we're talking about web or database
stuff
want to have better support (sometime out of box) for version control
(GIT, SVN, TFS, Perforce)
don't won't to have problems with dependencies (this could be
actually painful as well)
want to use new VSTO objects like NamedRange incl. events
want to learn new platform
I remember myself a few years ago when I thought VSTO brigs something new to Office object model, and it doesn't if you don't count the VSTO objects. So if you're heavily working with just Excel object model (manipulating with ranges, sheets, workbooks, calculating) you can still live with VBA only.
I also remember that with VSTO you can't easily create UDF (custom function)
Also seems like that MS is not going to invest too much effort to add/update/improve VSTO, they rather focus on Office API
VSTO blog - comments
Thanks for your question Ben, we have already publically announced that we will not be turning off VSTO or VBA in the next version of Office. All of our new investments are in Apps for Office and Apps for SharePoint and making the Office 365 APIs more robust. We will not be making any future investments in VSTO or VBA
It might look like I'm against VSTO but I'm not, I've been using it for more than 4 years daily and returning back to VBA just for quick testing or quick projects.
Hope this helps
From developing language, Excel Editor is VBA, and VS is C#/VB.NET. If you have a light function, you could use VBA directly, if you have a large requirement, .NET/VSTO would be suitable, it would be convenient to manage your code in VS, .NET.VSTO is managed code, it’s performance is better than VBA. With VSTO, you could custom Office UI. From distributing your project, you need to copy the office file with macro enabled. You could use ClickOnce or Windows installer to distribute .net/VSTO solution.
I'm thinking of game in game user interface.
Check out XNAML:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/valentin/pages/xnaml-component.aspx
http://xnaml.codeplex.com/
[The] engine is designed to run in a
pure Xna environement on all supported
device. My engine is extensible, you
can add your own controls, inherit
from base classes (such as Control or
Pane) to make your own behavior. The
compatibility with Xaml is complete.
Create your interface on Blend and
make a simple copy/past action to add
the Xaml file in your Xna project !
Extract a C# code from a Silverlight
project and just add it to your own
Xna project !
I would definitely check out the suggestions the The ZMan has put up on this post. There are lots of UI libraries in his post.
I think you should look at this list:
I remember Crazy Eddie as a good GUI builder.
Probably a bare-bones approach (but anything XNA will be) would be the ScreenManager class as used by the Microsoft code samples. A guide to using it can be found in the Game State Management documentation.
Another possibility is XPF, an XNA-compatible library that seeks to replicate some of WPF's UI architecture. I use it myself - it's simple and elegant. It will be free for non-commercial use, with commercial pricing TBA.
(I haven't been able to load the XNAML website, but I'd guess XPF and XNAML have similar goals.)
I use an ActiveX control called TAPIEx enabling TAPI phone system integration using MS Access 2000 (+Visual Basic). I want to turn this Access database into a web app with the clients running Firefox (all on internal network).
Since Firefox doesnt support ActiveX is it feasible for me to write a Firefox plugin that in turn utilizes the ActiveX control?
With regard to how plugins work - Would I be able to call 'functions' of the plugin from page script (eg dial call specifying phone number, check if calls in process)? Would adding these functions to the Firefox right click menu 'globally' inside Firefox be easier?
Hope you guys can help. Note I'm not a fulltime programmer; I just need to know how steep the learning curve will be or even if my idea is possible!
Ive now found a project to allow using activex controls in firefox that seems to be quite up to date at:
http://code.google.com/p/ff-activex-host/
Theoretically, yes you could write a Firefox plugin with C++ that talked to the ActiveX component via COM. But the learning curve for both COM and C++ FF plugins are both horribly steep. I wouldn't recommend it.
As Kalmi says, just use IE.
I am in the process of designing a .net windows forms application that uses metadata to drive the UI. Apart from finding http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms954610.aspx, I have nothing much to look forward to. Anyone here worked on metadata driven User interfaces? What are the implications of following this methodology and any pointers would be greatly helpful.
The most obvious answer would be that Microsoft have themselves embraced this concept through their use of Xaml in Windows Presentation Foundation which replaces WinForms (to an extent).
If you want to stick to a WinForms, you may want to consider MyXaml which is kind of a homage to Xaml for WinForms!
You may want to check out Evolutility CRUD framework. It is an open source metadata driven framework for CRUD generating all UI at run-time.
It comes w/ source code (in C# and JS) and many samples.
http://www.evolutility.org
You may try this with HTA. Sometime back I created a metadata driven application using HTA and XML. I created XAML like structure and HTA-VBScript code to parse this structure and render diffent types of UI elements along with validations.
Check the Andromeda project out, which does so extensively. Too bad the stack isn´t .NET friendly (PHP, Postgres, Perl).
Imagine you homebrew a custom gui framework that doesn't use windows handles (compact framework, so please don't argue with "whys"). One of the main disadvantages of developing such a framework is that you lose compatability with the winform designer.
So my question is to all of you who know a lot about VS customisation, would there be a clever mechanism by which one could incorperate the gui framework into the designer and get it to spit out your custom code instead of the standard windows stuff in the InitialiseComponent() method?
I recently watched a video of these guys who built a WoW AddOn designer for Visual Studio.
They overcame the task of getting their completely custom controls to render correctly in the designer. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you need, but might be worth looking at. It's open-source:
http://www.codeplex.com/WarcraftAddOnStudio
I've also since discovered that DXCore from DevExpress is a tool that simplifies plugin development. The default implementation wouldn't let me dock as document (central) but regardless one can still easily generate a plugin with it that can compile a file on the fly and render the contents of it which may well do the job for me. :)