Introduction
This is a sample chapter from Programming Visual Basic 6.0
ActiveX controls are the descendants of the first OCX controls
that appeared when Visual Basic 4 was released. While they retain the same file
extension, they're very different beneath the surface. The original OCX controls
included a lot of low-level functionality (and consequently had to support many
COM interfaces), and therefore were heavy and relatively slow. The new ActiveX
controls were specifically redesigned to be embedded in HTML pages and delegate
much of their functionality to their container, be it Microsoft Internet Explorer,
a Visual Basic form, or any other ActiveX-compliant environment. Thanks to this
different approach, ActiveX controls are generally slimmer than old OCXs, download
faster, and load in memory more rapidly.