Here's where everything that's not a control but is useful source code goes.

Summary

• Common Dialog/Direct - the only full no-code change replacement for COMDLG32.OCX available
• Customising Clipboard Use
• Changing window shapes
• INI file and Registry access with Class
• Use the Shell's FileCopy, Move and Delete to Recycle bin methods
• Subclassing without the crashes
• Using Enumeration API methods in VB

The Library

Common Dialog/Direct

Common Dialog/Direct is a new DLL or class library which shows how to completely replace COMDLG32.OCX through Visual Basic code. The advantages are you no longer need to put a control on a form to use common dialogs - just declare an instance of the class and you have a straight replacement.

But of course, you get more through my library. All the Common Dialogs can now be made a child of your own VB form - so you can have extra buttons, tabs on your Common Dialog. Check out the VB Open Project dialog to get an idea of what this feature allows you to do.

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Customising Clipboard Use
Visual Basic provides you with the Clipboard object, which is good as long as you want to use the standard formats - text, picture or data.

But what if you want to store more information so people can cut and paste from your application with full formatting data, whilst still providing a generic method to get the text into other apps? Look at what Microsoft apps give you. If you put something on the clipboard from Excel or Word, you can paste it into Excel or Word with all the formatting information, or you can just paste the text.

The Custom Clipboard library superclasses the existing Clipboard library so you have the flexibility to register new customised clipboard formats in addition to the standard ones. You can paste all the data you want into the custom format, so when a user Cuts/Copies/Pastes in your app, they don't loose anything. They'll like you for it!

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Changing Window Shapes

Just for fun, now your VB window or custom control can be almost any shape you want! All you need is a few API declares and a bit of imagination and soon you can have a window that's star-shaped, circular or tank-shaped - well, its up to you.

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