A Complete ActiveX Web Control Tutorial

This article is intended to help you get up to speed quickly with developing an ActiveX control. It will show you the basic concepts you need to know about ActiveX, such as methods, properties, and events, and how to communicate between an ActiveX control and a web page.

ActiveX is a Microsoft technology developed in the mid 90s, that allows for the creation of applet-like applications that can be downloaded and run within Microsoft's Web browser. This article is intended for Visual C++ developers who are trying to learn how to develop their first ActiveX control for a web application but finding it difficult. While trying to learn this technology myself, I found much of the information available on ActiveX was either no longer available, out of date, or missing critical information, making it extremely difficult for me to create an ActiveX control necessary for my development project. This article is intended to help you get up to speed quickly with developing an ActiveX control. It will show you the basic concepts you need to know about ActiveX, such as methods, properties, and events, and how to communicate between an ActiveX control and a web page. You will learn how to implement the control for use with default security settings in Internet Explorer on Windows XP, without getting unsigned or unsafe control warning messages.

For this tutorial, we will create an ActiveX control that displays a progress bar animated GIF when the control is loaded as a way to indicate to users that the control is loading and processing information. The control will contain functionality to demonstrate how to pass information between the control and the web page. You will be guided step by step on creating the control using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Creating an ActiveX Control

To create an ActiveX control, use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to perform the following steps:

From File menu, select New, then Project.

1. In the New Project dialog, as shown in Figure 1, under Project types, select Visual C++, MFC. Under Templates, select MFC ActiveX Control.
2. Name the project MyActiveX; for Location, enter the working folder for the project's source code, and then click the OK button.

Read more: Codeproject

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