Nutshell - ActiveX

ActiveX Info

Lingo in a Nutshell & Director in a Nutshell

Will the ActiveX Xtra be covered in the LIAN or DIAN books?

By the time the ActiveX control shipped with D6.5, the book was pretty far along and there was no room to include the level of detail that I felt it warranted in the book. (The book is over 600 pages and is very inexpensive, so I had to limit some material to fit within the page count).

I agree that the ActiveX Xtra is very important and that it gives a lot of people trouble (in part because it is used with any number of ActiveX controls). As such, I wanted to give it full and proper treatment, and the space limitations in the book simply didn't allow it.

I will be posting a complete white paper on the ActiveX control to my site in the upcoming months to address the lack of details on this particular Xtra in the book.

The books do include detailed chapters on working with Xtras, and you can get the short documentation on the Xtra in the message window using the "put mMessageList" command.

The ActiveX control also comes with HTML help files from Macromedia.

Keep in mind that they purpose of my books is to complement and extend the Director documentation, not simply rehash them. As such you should first familiarize yourself with the existing documentation. As always, you should also consult the technotes on the Macromedia site.

I also highly recommend Gretchen's Macdowall's article on the subject at:

http://www.updatestage.com/previous/980701.html#item3

I wouldn't be surprised if the Lingo User's Journal or Macromedia User's Journal have also covered the ActiveX issue.