Adding an About Box

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ActiveX controls can have an About property at the top of the Properties window
as shown in the following illustration.

To add an About box to your control

1. Add an About Dialog form similar to the one listed below to the ActiveX project not the program to test it !

Steps: Click the Add Form Button on the Visual Basic toolbar. Then double-click the About Dialog icon as highlighted in yellow in the dialog box below.

The following dialog box will be displayed.

Change the Captions of the four labels in the About Form above using code by changing the statements in the Form_Load event to explain the purpose and the properties of the newly created ActiveX control. Change the Picture property of the PictureBox control if appropriate, and also the Icon property of the About Form. Remember to change the Caption property of the form! The Project Window should now look like the following diagram.

2. Create a public procedure in the control class to display the form. Since the procedure is public the code is placed in the General section of your code window for the UserControl1 form, not your newly created About form! Double-click on the UserControl1 Icon in the above diagram to make the UserControl1 form the Active Window. Click the View Code icon in the Project Window, then click on General in the object drop-down list in the code window and type in the code listed in red below.

The following example code displays the About Dialog form for your ActiveX control:

Public Sub ShowAbout()

frmAbout.Show vbModal
Unload frmAbout
Set frmAbout = Nothing

End Sub

3. Assign the public procedure to the AboutBox procedure attribute of your control class. You must click the View Code icon in the Project Window first.

a. On the Tools menu, select Procedure Attributes. The following dialog box will be displayed.

b. In the Procedure Attributes dialog box, select the procedure that displays the About box (ShowAbout), and click Advanced. The following properties will be added to the bottom portion of the dialog box listed above.

c. In the Procedure ID listbox, select AboutBox as shown in the above dialog box, and click .

4. To see the for AboutBox for the Active-X control follow the steps below. You must put the Active-X control icon into a New Project first.

a. On the Properties Window, select About Property.

b. In the value area, Click the Build Button and view the About box that displays

c. Click when finished viewing the AboutBox.

Specifying a Toolbox Bitmap

You can specify a custom bitmap to appear in the Visual Basic Control Toolbox, as shown in the following illustration. The icon is a new icon used for the ActiveX control.

Toolbox bitmaps are 16 by 15 pixels in size. If you specify a bitmap of a different size, it will be scaled to 16 by 15 pixels, which will usually distort the image.

To specify a Toolbox bitmap, set the ToolboxBitmap property of the UserControl object to the bitmap you want displayed for the control.

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