I’ve released new versions of Animation, ButtonControls, EditControls and TrackBar. All controls come with improved drawing code which fixes a couple of problems that could occur with version 6.0 of comctl32.dll.
You might wonder what happened to ButtonControls 1.8.0. Well, I released it yesterday and an hour later I had an idea how the drawing performance of the Frame control can be improved extremely while making it more robust against drawing issues at the same time. I could have canceled the release, but this would have produced some chaos in my source code repository.
EditControls 1.8.0 contains an interesting new VB6 sample project: A search box that looks and feels like the search box of Windows 7 Explorer. It also requires the ToolBarControls library and runs on Windows Vista/7 only with Aero Glass being activated – that’s the price for using modern API calls.
Blog
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Animation 2.5.0, ButtonControls 1.8.1, EditControls 1.8.0, TrackBar 1.5.1
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TabStrip 1.5.1
I’ve fixed a tiny, drag’n’drop related bug in the TabStrip control.
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ComboListBoxControls 1.2.2, ExplorerListView 1.3.2, ShellBrowserControls 1.2.1
I’ve released a couple of updates. ComboListBoxControls 1.2.2 fixes an important bug in the DriveComboBox control which did not display network drives that are currently not available.
ExplorerListView 1.3.2 fixes the methods for finding items, which did not work on Windows Vista and newer.
ShellBrowserControls 1.2.1 is the largest update today. It fixes several bugs, for instance Tiles view did not work for the recycle bin. It also improves support for dragging items from different namespaces or displaying a shell context menu for such items. However, the most important improvements have been made in the area of network drives. Previous versions became extremely slow if your system contained network drives and you opened “My Computer”. Performance in this area has been improved massively. -
ExplorerListView 1.3.1, ExplorerTreeView 2.2.1
I’ve fixed a couple of tiny, drag’n’drop related bugs in ExplorerListView and ExplorerTreeView.
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Animation 2.4.0
I’ve released another update. Version 2.4.0 of the Animation control comes with rewritten background drawing code which should fix a couple of rare drawing issues on Windows Vista and newer.
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ButtonControls 1.7.0, ToolBarControls 1.0.2
Happy new year everyone!
I’ve released a new version of the ButtonControls library. It fixes only one bug, but lots of code has changed, therefore it is version 1.7.0 instead of 1.6.2.
The ToolBarControls library has been updated to version 1.0.2. It fixes a couple of minor bugs. -
ToolBarControls 1.0.1
I’ve released a bugfix for the ToolBarControls library. It fixes the problem that the tool bar in the chevron popup window did not get the same Windows theme as the control itself.
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ToolBarControls 1.0.0
Two years ago, after releasing the ComboListBoxControls library, I started to work on a new control library consisting of a tool bar control and a rebar (“CoolBar”) control. I knew it would take a lot of time until the first release, because at this time I also took an employment. I had no idea that it would take two years until the first release.
Okay, to be honest, almost one year ago, I almost released the library. But when writing some sample projects, I recognized that it was much too difficult to use the controls to create a menu bar – especially in MDI applications. Therefore I decided to integrate a menu mode directly into the control library. It was a good decision, because I also found many bugs and later decided to also integrate chevron popups (because it also was too difficult to achieve in VB6).
So when I was ready to release again, summer was over. To demonstrate the power of the controls, I decided to provide a sample application that imitates the look of Office 2000, XP and 2003 (depending on the style the user selects). This sample helped me to find and improve some poorly-designed features. Today I finished this Office Style sample and decided to release the control library. Actually the control is in the wild already – my beta tester Christian Lütgens is already using it in production.Of course both controls support Unicode and all the new features of Windows XP, Vista and 7. The tool bar control supports customization via the system’s built-in customization dialog. Using the ControlHostWindow class that is part of the control library, you can create free-floating tool bars – the Events sample demonstrates this. Unfortunately, so far undocking and docking the tool bar is possible via source code only – drag’n’drop support is missing. This feature is extremly complicated and I did not want to work on the control library for two more years. I probably will try to implement real dockable tool bars, but I cannot promise that I’ll be successful.
Before you ask: I do not yet know what I’ll do next.
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ProgressBar 2.3.0
I’ve released version 2.3.0 of the ProgressBar control. It comes with a neat new feature: It can draw a text over the progress bar.
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ExplorerTreeView 1.15.2
I’ve released a new version of ExplorerTreeView 1.x. It fixes an auto-update bug that occured under rare circumstances.