VBX Controls in MTB 4.0

I hope the answer to this question is simply that you had bad luck in the sophisticated VBX controls you tried. Our documentation (admittedly, I don't know what our advertising says) says that we "officially" only support VBX controls from Microsoft and the MicroHelp custom controls. The reason for the word "officially" is those are the only controls we were able thoroughly test. There are literally thousands of VBX controls in the world, and we were not able to test all of them. We did test many, though unfortunately I have no experience with HiEdit, and I don't know which scheduler you were using.

You will find that Toolbook 4.0 does not work with every VBX on the market. Remember that:

  1. VBX is an undocumented standard
  2. The VBX market exploded beyond Microsoft's expectations, and as a result they were unable to control the quality or establish guidelines for VBX design.
As as a result, the only way to tell if a VBX is a VBX is to find out if it works in Visual Basic (and not all do that very well). Our problem is, the VBX authors sometimes make unwarranted assumptions that they are working in Visual Basic. I have seen VBXs that try and take over Visual Basic's menu bar or main window, for example. Clearly these same controls will never work with Toolbook.

We do support the vast majority of VBXs, which is why I think you have just been particularly unlucky. Though this will not please everyone, our feeling was that given any category of VBX, our customers would be able to find more that worked with Toolbook than that did not. In other words, if you want an editor, try another editor VBX.

The new standard for custom controls is OCX, which was designed from the beginning as an open standard supporting many OCX containers, not just Visual Basic. (Yes, that probably gives away the show, but I would assume anyone who cared would have guessed that was our next logical step after VBX anyhow).

     John Gossman
     Toolbook Development Manager
     Asymetrix
User tested VBX Controls
Hi!

I was able to test a version of Multimedia Toolbook 4.0 (Asymetrix germany is still not shipping version 4.0). I was very intrested in VBX support, because of the wide range of tools on the market, so that I tested a list of commly used tools.

First of all I tried a few very simple vbx-objects. Everything worked properly, but a little slow. Starting the propertyeditor vor a vbx-object takes a few seconds, but it works.

After that i tried some more complex and mighty vbx-extensions. First of all HiEdit. Adding this extension and creating such an object worked, but when entering authormode i recieved an errormessage which tells me that this kind of message is not supported in this version of toolbook. No further information was avaiable, neither in online help, nor in printed documentation. Any action on this object created the same error.

So I droped HiEdit, had to leave windows, because some files where still locked and could not be reopend, and tried a sheduler. This try was very short: ToolBook caused an GPF.

My questions:

By the way: the price for the 4.0 update is ok for professional developers because of the included scriptremover. As some vbx-controls work and for the shared scripts we will order a new version anyway, but the only reason for naming the new version of toolbook 4.0 must be Microsoft's VB4.0.

Bye, Joerg.

Brian Parkhurst
Box 357260
Seattle, WA 98195-7260
206/543-9175