ActiveX Controls?

Does anyone have a decent resource for learning how to write an ActiveX control?
All I need is something very basic. It creates its main window (or gets the handle for its container window), grabs its parameters, does some stuff that's not at all ActiveX related, and then does nothing until it's closed.

I have messed around with MSDN, the VS documentation, and random Google searches for two hours now. It's almost impossible to find a standalone SDK for the thing... So far, I do not see any reason why anyone would prefer this over Netscape Gecko, which has far superior documentation which is still more useful than the nearly non-existent stuff for ActiveX even though a load of it needs to be accessed through archive.org.


Please prove me wrong. (Or try valiantly to by showing me where to look).




Alternatively, (and preferably), does anybody happen to know what I can do about pluginhostctrl.dll giving me a grey box in some of its test files, even though it works in others? The control is clearly working, but the plugin to execute is not. The documentation for that thing tells me to look at the test files, but they serve no purpose because there is no further documentation such as "If it does not work, do this step again, you stupid...".
PluginHostCtrl is here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/plugin-host-control.html

PluginHostControl - Modified works for me - I could tell you how to modify it but I'd have to charge you :). As far as activeX controls go you should look at MSDN it's a good place to start - you'll find exactly what you want there =/

Okay, I'll do a bit of modifying... see what's going on. A few message boxes at places for debugging should do :)

I have a post going on MozillaZine, too, but I don't think it will get anywhere.

Looking at the source code, this is definietly a more strange system than Gecko... lots of different files.


Thanks for the reply -- I was beginning to lose hope in anyone else in the entire world using these things :)

I reckon you might not be registering the control properly. It took me hours of mucking around to get the control working properly. Microsoft have some good tools for ActiveX control error reporting, I can't remember the name of the stuff now and I'm half @#!*ed.