OCXUpdater

OCXUpdater is a FREE open-source utility for Visual Basic 5/6 developers. It can be used to replace one ActiveX control with another in your VB projects. It is called OCXUpdater because it works with visual ActiveX controls which usually has the "OCX" extension.

If you are a VB developer and use an ActiveX component in your projects, you face a problem when a new version of the ActiveX control is released and you need to replace the old version with the new one saving all the properties you made through the Property Editor. It can be done by editing the source files directly in such text editors as Notepad, but it is a real pain because you need to know the CLSID, ProgID, type library name and other low-level parameters of your OCX's.

OCXUpdater significantly simplifies this work: all you need to do is to point the old and new OCX files and click a launch button – OCXUpdater does the rest of this work automatically.

The utility has an enough simple self-explanatory one-screen interface that mimics the work of a wizard application:

(Click to Enlarge)

To use it, select the project to update in the first step, then select the old component from your project on step #2 and the new one in step #3, and finally click the Start Update Process button.

As a nice addition, OCXUpdater also saves all the settings you made between program launches. We and the customers of our ActiveX components, such as the iGrid control, use this utility to update our projects when the new versions of the control come out.

OCXUpdater is written in Visual Basic 6 and refers the TypeLib Information DLL (tlbinf32.dll) that allows you to programmatically extract information from type libraries. This DLL is redistributable and ships with Visual Studio 6.0 or Visual Basic 6.0, but if you do not have it, you can download it from the Download section at our website.