Library tutorials & articles

A Real-Time VB6 ActiveX News Control

By Mitchell Harper, published on 10 Apr 2002

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Conclusion

Well there you have it, a nifty little ActiveX control that uses the power of XML, the Internet, and Visual Basic. There are heaps of ways that you can improve on this control, and they will all give you some good programming practice. Here are some of them:

- Create a publicly accessible function called "SetBGColour" that will accept three integer values, R, G, and B. Set the background colour of the control to the windows version of these RGB values, and return the old colour as an integer. The functions declaration would look like this: Public SetBGColor(R as integer, G as integer, B as integer) As integer

- Create a "Next >>" link at the bottom of the control. Add some code to display the next five news headlines. When all of the twenty headlines have been displayed, display a "<< Previous" button link, to navigate back through the articles.

- Use the news categories at http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list_xml.html to add a drop down box and a command button to the top of our ActiveX control. Let the user choose a category, and retrieve the headlines for that category.

Comments

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10 Jul 2002 at 00:15

Good example.

This is the first time played with any xmlhttp feeds, and found the example whet my appetite for more! The code was not quite complete, but if you are familiar with vb then you should be able to fill in the blanks. Once you get it working, you will no doubt see the other possible uses of this technology.

Keep it real.
koz

17 Apr 2002 at 15:18

I've went thru the listing a few times, and it is not working for me at all....

Things I noticed, the For loop he uses has no Next statement

I'm probably overlooking something ....any suggestions?

And after the LoadNews returns a TRUE it has EXIT function, shouldn't that be end?

Thanks!

Edit = typos
James Crowley

13 Apr 2002 at 05:31

hmmm... yes... it seems the author hasn't released the entire VB project for the control. The hand icon will in fact be in your VB installation directory (in something like Shared/Icons/ along with the icons/toolbar bitmaps etc).
Greg Dirst

12 Apr 2002 at 15:16

I see the images for the article, but not any hand images.
James Crowley

12 Apr 2002 at 14:02

don't you see any images on http://www.developerfusion.com/show/2273/2/ ? Try hitting refresh on your browser....
Greg Dirst

12 Apr 2002 at 12:44

I went to the article again and found no images?
James Crowley

12 Apr 2002 at 11:50

There was one crucial thing missing from the article.... the images I have now added them, which might make it a bit easier for future readers
Greg Dirst

11 Apr 2002 at 14:57

This was a somwehat confusing but very cool article once you get it working. What was frustrating was that the article indicated there was support material, but I cannot find any anywhere. This just made me really read the article and work with the project until I had it working.

Great topic and a useful tool to add to any non-profit individual.

BTW, I wonder what it costs to use for $$ purposes?