Old What's New Items

What's New (Archive Items)

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25 November 1998

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vbAccelerator has moved to a new site! Hope you like it. To celebrate, there are 14 new articles and 2 new controls.

Added Creating drop-down tool windows. This article provides a class which allows a PictureBox or UserControl to work like a drop-down tool window. Sample code demonstrates a table designer like the one on Word97's toolbar.

Updated the Icon Menu control. This fixes a bug with the MenuExit event, which wasn't fired for the first menu item. Thanks to Aaron Abdis.

Added the Toolbar/Rebar FAQ which provides information and some bug workarounds for the vbAccelerator Toolbar and Rebar control.

Added the vbAccelerator Tab Control.

Added the vbAccelerator Status Bar Control and the No-Status-Bar Status Bar Class.

Added two new subclassing samples:

Detecting when another application is activated
Reliable Interception of WM_NCHITTEST messages you can use to create fake title bars and resize boxes.

Added the IPerPropertyBrowse DLL and Type Library from Paul Wilde. This excellent sample shows you how to respond to property browse events in the VB IDE and customise the available items to pick from. Full sample code shows how to create a drop-down list in the IDE Properties window to pick a control on the UserControl's parent form.

Added the article Customising Clipboard Use - find out exactly what's on the clipboard, create a Clipboard viewer application and Paste data in multiple formats, including your own customised ones. Also demonstrates how to Copy and Paste files in the same way as Explorer.

Added the Image Processing and Real time Effects using DIB Sections source code and articles. This demonstrates a greatly expanded Image Processing repetoire and some cool real time fade effects.

Using DIB Sections and the cDIBSection Class Wrapper
Rank Filters for impressionist style filter effects.
Hue Lightness and Saturation (HLS) Model and Manipulating Colours
Floyd-Stucci Colour Reduction Method and Gray Scaling

Added a selection of new Links and categorised the links into a slightly more rational order. There is still much to do here, though!

Added the Headlines page. This month: the new site and vbAccelerator versus VB6.

Fixed a bug in the Graduated Title Bar subclassing demonstration which could prevent Form_Resize messages being sent.

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8 November 1998

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Added the Office 97 Flat Combo Boxes sample. With this class or DLL, two lines of code allow you to change a standard VB combo box or a vbAccelerator Owner Draw Combo and List Box control into a flat one with hot mouse-over highlighting.

Added the Creating Office 97 Style Flat Combo Boxes in a Rebar project - another sample demonstrating more advanced uses of the vbAccelerator Toolbar and Image list control.

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25 October 1998

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Added the Hierarchy Tree Selector control sample. This allows you to easily create Win98 Folder Options Dialog style option pickers.

Added three new projects demonstrating more advanced uses of the vbAccelerator Toolbar and Image list control:

Updated the Using enumeration methods with VB to find fonts and Windows sample. The font sample now has charset support and fixes a bug with the previous version where the full name, style and charset properties were not returned correctly. Thanks to Serge Baranovsky for pointing out the error and sending some better code! (Check out his site at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9086/default.html)

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19 October 1998

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Updated the SSUBTMR.DLL, the core subclassing component in all my controls. There was a bug in it which caused problems when using the Toolbar and Rebar control.

Added the AppBar class from Paolo Giacomuzzi (paolo.giacomuzzi@usa.net). This is a great class which completely covers the Shell's AppBar interface allowing you to easily create fully-featured shell toolbars.

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12 October 1998

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Added four new tips to the vbAccelerator Tips Section, covering API to Picture conversion for bitmaps and icons and the Combo Box.

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11 October 1998

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My apologies that the site hasn't been updated for a while. A holiday and deadline pressures I'm afraid. More frequent updates coming for a few months now!

Added the vbAccelerator Toolbar and Rebar control - flat toolbars, drop down buttons, full rebar support and more!

Added the vbAccelerator ImageList control and class - a better image list which supports all vbAccelerator controls, including the Icon Menu Control, the Owner Draw Combo and List Box control and the new Toolbar and Rebar control.

vbAccelerator receives its first submission! The E-checker application from Julio Moreyra (jmoreyra@juschubut.gov.ar) uses the VB WinSock control to check for new mail on a POP3 server. In Spanish and English using string resources.

Updated the CommonDialog/Direct DLL - a few bugs in the Page Setup and Print Dialog have been corrected. Plus the dialog hook support has been improved.

Updated the Centre a Common Dialog - the easy and the hard way sample to take advantage of the hooking features in the latest release of CommonDialog/Direct.

Added the Create a VB style Open Project dialog sample.

Updated the Icon Menu Control . This bug fix prevents the Icon Menu control from blanking a COMCTL32.OCX Status Bar added to your application, and makes the operation smoother.

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9 August 1998

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Started the new Tips section - providing small but fully formed code snippets to get you started with graphics and Win32 API calls

Added the Use PSAPI.DLL to get a complete task list and process memory usage sample to the Code section

Added the Common Control DLL Version sample to the Code section.

Added the Unlimited Popup Icon Menu DLL, a small DLL which allows you to create as many new, multi-level context popup menus with icons as you want.

Updated the Icon Menu Control. The icons now display correctly when menu items are disabled, and also highlighting is in the correct colour.

Added the article Draw disabled, colourised and dithered icons using DrawState to the source code area.

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20 July 1998

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Added the Image Processing sample to the Code section.

Added the Sprite Library sample to the Code section.

Updated the Registry access with class sample.
The text now includes source demonstrating how to get and set binary values in the registry. The VB Registry Editor sample on the page has also been updated and now both shows and allows editing of binary values in the registry. (Be careful, though!)

Updated the Links section.
Carl and Gary's is now back on line, and also my links to Patrice Scribe's site and the Unlimited Realities site had become out of date.

Fixed the Add Active Channel button.
vbAccelerator's active channel now provides active updates to the Source Code list, this page and my home page.

Fixed broken links in the ActiveX Documenter project.

Added this page.

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21 June 1998

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Added the Splitting for all types of forms sample.

Added the SysTray the easy way sample.

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15 June 1998

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vbAccelerator goes on-line!
After a number of weeks living on my hard-drive, I've finally released the site to the web. There's still quite a few dead links and code to post, which I hope to have solved by the end of July.

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