Thanks for the info Ian but as I said in my original posting, the unsupported registry mods made VB very unstable in my experience. I was able to see my .NET controls in VB and sometimes even use them for a while, but the VB6 IDE crashed in a variety of ways and would often refuse to re-load the project once I had saved it. My .NET control was decidedly nontrivial but didn't contain any unsafe code or hacks, so I believe the problems are in the unsupported .NET interop with the VB6 IDE although they may not happen in every circumstance. Since I'm not building a VB6 application but rather a set of controls for our customers to use in their own VB6 applications, I need to use an approach that's stable and "supported" by Microsoft.
Jay -----Original Message----- From: Ian MacLean [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 07, 2002 3:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Plans to introp .NET controls into COM applications take a look at http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/exposingdotnetcontrols.asp Exposing .Net controls as ActiveX controls works, just not out of the box. basically all thats missing is a couple of registry settings. This was done intentionally since microsoft didn't want to have to gaurentee that this will work with all possible activeX hosts. However its worked fine in my experience. Ian >Can anyone say whether Microsoft plans to ever support interoping .NET >controls into legacy COM environments like (especially) VB6? This is the >single biggest roadblock preventing us from adopting .NET as a development >environment. I'm well aware that there are unsupported registry mods that >make .NET controls available to VB6, but I've tried them and it made VB >highly unstable. I'm looking for a fully-supported solution. > >We have a COM product that includes many complex ActiveX controls developed >in VB6, and we have existing customers using those controls in their VB6 >and C++/COM applications. We'd love to move our product to a pure .NET >implementation, but it would render it unusable to those existing customers >and many of them have product lifecycles in excess of 5 years so it's not >reasonable to expect them to all jump on the .NET bandwagon right away. It >would greatly benefit us to be able to take advantage of .NET for control >development, but any such benefit would be more than negated if we have to >maintain two separate code bases. So unless/until Microsoft gives us a way >to build controls in .NET that are usable in COM applications, we're stuck >building and maintaining all our controls in VB6. > >Jay > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or >subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. > > > > You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
