iGrid Control - Compatibility

iGrid is written entirely in Visual Basic 6 and widely uses Windows API calls. It was tested and works well in all 32-bit and 64-bit releases of MS Windows. These are Windows 95/98/Me/NT4/2000/XP/2003 and Vista.

If you want to use the iGrid control in compiled (exe) applications, you need only the VB6 run-time support library installed in your system (the main file is MSVBVM60.DLL).

The functionality of the iGrid control depends on the versions of Windows Shell DLL (SHELL32.DLL) and Windows Common Controls Library (COMCTL32.DLL) installed in your system. The control requires the version 4.71 or higher of COMCTL32.DLL (shipped also with Internet Explorer 4.0+) and the version 5.00 or higher of SHELL32.DLL (more info about redistributing these libraries can be found at MSDN in the "Shell and Common Controls Versions" topic). iGrid works in systems with previous versions of these DLLs (for instance, in Windows 95 with IE 3.x), and only the following two insignificant features, flat scroll bars and immediate column resizing with its header, do not function.

If you work in Windows XP with Visual Styles turned on, and your application also uses visual styles, iGrid cannot use flat scroll bars and colored column headers, as these features are not available in visual styles.

iGrid OCX is compiled with VB6 IDE as a full-featured ActiveX control, and in theory can be used in any development environment that supports ActiveX controls. However, you should test iGrid OCX comprehensively in a non-VB6 environment before you buy it because some environments can use ActiveX in its own way (like MS Visual FoxPro - read more about it below). The next paragraphs describe shortly the use of iGrid in such environments.

iGrid OCX works in UserFroms without any problems and can be easily used in VBA code because it is a subset of Visual Basic IDE and language. The only event that does not work in UserForms is ScrollBarThicknessChanged as the current implementation of this event relies on the grid's container and we guarantee that this event will work properly only in VB6.

You can also use all features of iGrid in MS Access forms as well as in UserForms (except the ScrollBarThicknessChanged event). Earlier versions of iGrid had some problems with control keys (such as ENTER) in this environment because MS Access treats them as their own control keys, but the latest version of iGrid is free from these problems due to a special low-level hook implemented in iGrid.

iGrid can be used in MS VC++ like any other ActiveX controls, however it is always harder to use an ActiveX control in VC than in VB (this concerns all ActiveX controls but not only iGrid). As we know several people tried to use iGrid in VC, and they all said that in VB you can do it ten times faster.

Visual FoxPro 5.0-7.0 is the only known MS development environment that does not allow you to use iGrid control properly - iGrid scroll bars are not drawn correctly in Visual FoxPro forms. Most likely, this is an internal error of VFP that does not allow us to use standard Win32 API scroll bars, but we cannot know for sure as we do not have VFP source codes.

However, you do not encounter such problems in VFP 8.0-9.0, and it seems the control really works in this version. In any case, if you are going to use the control in this version of VFP, we recommend that you to test it in this environment just in case.

A couple of our testers tried to use our grid in Delphi forms, but they had the same problems as in MS VC++. To use an ActiveX control in Delphi, you need to deal with its type library and transform VB syntax using the COM control interface. More over, COM data types (such as Variant) are not native to Delphi, and you will get additional problems with them if you want to use iGrid in Delphi. Delphi programmers also say that VB is the ideal development environment for iGrid.