## Teach Yourself ActiveX in 21 Days

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Week 3 at a Glance

Week 3 focuses on the ActiveX controls that you can use to create dynamic Web pages.

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Day 15: What Is an ActiveX Control?

Day 15 explores background information that will prove useful when you are learning to use ActiveX controls. Day 15 covers how ActiveX controls came to be, how these controls are used, where you can find ActiveX controls on the Internet, and the system requirements for using ActiveX controls.

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Day 16: Installing ActiveX Controls

Day 16 teaches you about the <OBJECT> container tag, as well as how to use an ActiveX Control within a Web page and how to add an ActiveX Control to a Visual Basic project. You will create a basic Web site for a fictitious company and build your first, and possibly most exciting, ActiveX Visual Basic application: a Web browser.

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Day 17: ActiveX Control Downloading

During Day 17, you will learn about the actual process of installing Internet components and a few ways to prevent the installation of unwanted code or content.

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Day 18: Customizing ActiveX Control Properties

During Day 18, you will learn more about what ActiveX controls are, what they can do, and how to make them do it. This chapter covers the controls that come with the Internet Explorer, and teaches you how to manipulate options (or parameters) available with the different ActiveX objects.

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Day 19: User Interaction with ActiveX Controls

During Day 19, you will learn how to enable people who access your ActiveX utility to interact with the controls you learned about during previous days. When you are finished with this chapter, you will be able to create an interactive ActiveX HTML document and an interactive ActiveX Visual Basic application.

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Day 20: Using the Internet Control Pack

During Day 20, you will learn how the Internet Control Pack came into being, and learn what protocols this pack includes, and what programs support this feature. You will use the Internet Control Pack with Visual Basic to create several Internet projects, including a POP3 mail checker, an SMTP mail-sending utility, an HTML Web browser, an HTTP keyword-search utility, an FTP directory-information utility, and an NNTP newsgroup-information utility.

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Day 21: Creating an ActiveX Control

In this chapter you will be exposed to some of the advanced features of COM and DCOM OLE programming. This chapter also reviews some of the features of control creation and how they apply to ActiveX. You will learn how and why to edit the system registry, some of the features and requirements of a COM/DCOM control, and OLE interface design for objects and classes.