Visual Basic Concepts
What's New in Component Creation
Create Your Own Data Consumers
Professional and Enterprise Editions You can create data consumers, based on a UserControl or class, that support complex binding capabilities.
Professional and Enterprise Editions You can create your own data sources, based on a UserControl or class.
All Editions New F5 options allow you to choose where to run a component for debugging purposes — for example, running a control in a browser instead of in a Visual Basic form.
Professional and Enterprise Editions You can create windowless and transparent UserControls, which require fewer resources.
All Editions Procedures can now return arrays, which means that your classes can have arrays as properties. You can also assign the entire contents of one array to another array, as long as the array on the left side of the assignment is a dynamic array.
All Editions Class properties can be persisted to a PropertyBag for storage and retrieval.
Support for Managing ClassIDs/Compatibility
Professional and Enterprise Editions Project compatibility now maintains Class IDs between versions of ActiveX components.
Validation Events for UserControls
Professional and Enterprise Editions The Validate event allows you to validate a control’s data before the LostFocus event is fired.
Professional and Enterprise Editions Create ActiveX components that use apartment-model threading to execute procedures asynchronously on separate threads. (New for Visual Basic 5.0 Service Pack 2.)
Professional and Enterprise Editions Supports ParamArray, Optional, ByVal, and Default values in the argument list and supports Enums.
All Editions A new argument allows you to create objects on remote machines.
Professional and Enterprise Editions Automates creating middle-tier objects bound to the Data Environment or UserControls.
All Editions Provides notification to your ActiveX control when font characteristics are changed by an external source.
Professional and Enterprise Editions The new MTSTransactionMode property allows you to specify the transactional behavior of a class used in conjunction with the Microsoft Transaction Server.
All Editions Determines whether a user control allocates a fixed hDC for its lifetime rather than using a shared hDC as needed.