Re: Visual Basic for Autorun?

From: J French (erewhon_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 06/08/04 

Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 05:01:55 +0000 (UTC)

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 09:21:22 +1000, "Michael Culley"
<mculley@NOSPAMoptushome.com.au> wrote:

>"J French" <erewhon@nowhere.com> wrote in message news:40c3fd06.2365101@news.btclick.com...
>> 1) In the OP's circumstances
>> a) they are not needed
>> b) they are giving problems through self registration
>
>I wasn't talking about the OP because I presume your statement was more general. Unless I misunderstood you were stating that
>ActiveX dlls and ocxs should never be used.
>
>> 2) UserControls are excellent for encapsulation
>> however they do not need to be turned into OCXes
>
>Putting them in the exe is a bad way to do it. Encapsulating them in an ocx is a much more professional approach.

Why more professional ?

>> AX DLLs are a PITA
>
>No, they an invaluble tool, they seem to be a PITA to you because you don't know how to work with them. VB makes it very easy and
>there are only a few things you need to know.

I most certainly know /how/ to work with them, I simply do not like
working with them.

What advantage is there in turning a Class into a separate DLL ?

Where I need DLLs for complex things used by many different EXEs then
I use Delphi.

>> Under normal circumstances it is profoundly unlikely that a system
>> will consist of a number of EXEs running concurrently in memory and
>> sharing the same DLL/OCX code
>> - so the 'one copy in memory' argument does not normally hold water
>> for VB Apps
>
>I never said memory usage was an advantage of them.

Fair enough - that is just one of the standard arguments which does
not apply to VB DLLs (normally)

>> Because of the dodgy nature of AX, updating systems by simply
>> delivering AX DLLs is likely to cause more grief than recompiling and
>> distributing the EXEs
>
>This isn't that difficult, you just don't know how to do it.

I most certainly do know how to do it, and I dislike doing it
intensely.

>> - size of update is only really material for small systems
>> - so larger systems might as well be fully bound
>
>I don't consider distribution to be a big advantage of active X but it can give some advantages. I find that once something is
>encapsulated into it's own project it doesn't change that often so doesn't need to be distributed with a new release. We used to
>distibute a full package and a patch for our app, with the patch missing most of the ActiveX dlls and OCXs. This cut the download
>size in half.

But that is not very important nowadays.

>I noticed that you are thinking of it the other way around, that you would leave the exe the same and distribute new activeX dlls
>and ocxs. Generally this doesn't happen and there is no problem at all with distributing a new exe and keeping the ActiveX files the
>same.

You are to some extent right there, I assumed that your Apps were
'shells' for DLLs

So far I have only heard of one compelling reason for converting
UserControls into OCXes
- which was to prevent junior programmers tampering with the code

Although I have found one interesting 'feature' in VB5 which I guess
persists in VB6 where nesting one UC inside another causes problems.

I am intrigued why you think it 'professional' to turn UserControls
into OCXes - personally I consider it slightly dangerous.

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