Using An ActiveX OCX With EB?

[Tony]

There's an ActiveX OCX that I would love to use with EB. It's a simple Trialware Dialog control, that let's you set your program to run for x amount of days or x amount of times. The dialog displays at startup of your app and tells you how much time is left in the trial and has 3 buttons, Buy, Continue and Trial. It's free and available from here: http://www.tenmilesoftware.com/Trialware%20Dialog/trialwaredialog.html There's also a sample VB project illustrating how it's used. Now, for my question is it possible to use this in EB and if so, how? I've searched the forum and read info on using ActiveX with Aurora and downloaded the TypelLib Browser for the Aurora compiler to take a look at the Trialware control. I understand how I would use it with Aurora, C/C++ but am at a loss on implementing it in EB. If someone could point me in the right direction on getting it to work with EB I would appreciate, since it would suit my needs perfectly. Otherwise, I can write something similar from scratch, but would much prefer to use this as I don't want to re-invent the wheel and would rather spend the time on actually writing my apps/games.

Thanks,

  Tony.

[sapero]

Tony, I wish I could help, but unfortunately this ocx very unfriendly. The Show method is not working on my xp sp3. I have installed this ocx in sandboxie.
The typelib shows the interface as dual (for scripting and calling methods by -> operator), but at least two methods (setting the trial limits) crashed my program, so I decided to script it via IDispatch.

Attached my code - method Show fires internal error message.

[Tony]

Hey Sapero,

  Thanks for taking a look at it and the code. I've been working with the ocx here and came to the same conclusion as you, it is very unfriendly (probably why it is free.) I could get the dialog to show here on Vista Home Basic SP1 but I never could get the trial limits to work at all, whether I used x number of days or x number of times. Even though the Trialware dialog is a bust, your code is great learning tool for showing me the ins/outs of how I can use other ocx's with EB, so some good did come out of it in the end. I appreciate you taking the time to look at it and will be adding your code to my "code snippets" library for study.

  Since we couldn't get this to work, I've already started writing a native EB version of something similar. I'll keep you guys posted on the progress and when it's available.

Thanks again.

  Tony.

[JR]

 
I don't have tried it, but the introduction in the web page says that "works similar to the Microsoft Common Dialog control". If that is true, then you don't have to host it in an ATL window, but just create an instance of it with CoCreateInstance and then call the Show method.