ActiveX (COM) DLL in VB.NET

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FGump

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Im a VB6 developer and havent yet moved onto VB.NET. I just ordered a copy of Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 and am looking forward to start using it.

The company where I work has a large workflow program (not developed in-house) that can be customized by telling it to use external COM DLLs. Therefore weve been using VB6 for quite some time to create ActiveX DLL projects that can be called by the workflow program to add new features to it.

We would like to start using VB.NET. Can we create a COM DLL using .NET? If not, can anything similar be created with .NET so we can tell our workflow program to call/use it?

Thanks for your help.

FGump
 
Not quite what I meant

Thanks, but this article is showing how to access a .NET class from VB6. Perhaps Im misunderstanding it or I wasnt very clear in my question.

We currently have a program that my company uses that allows us (as developers) to automate certain parts of it or add new functionality. Lets call this the "main" program. This "main" program has a toolkit that we install and can use in VB6 for communicating with it.

So, we open up VB6, create an ActiveX DLL project, include a reference to their toolkit and code away. We can then tell the "main" program to use the DLL that we created in VB6 through a setup screen they provide. This requires telling the "main" program the DLL name and where a function (that they specify) is located since they are calling it. This acts as their entry point. For example, well enter DLLFilename.clsName and then the function name enter another textbox.

We want to start using .NET instead of VB6 for our coding. However, I dont think that .NET can compile/create an ActiveX DLL (its not listed as a possible project anyway). So my questions are:

1). Can VB.NET create an equivilant DLL similar to the ActiveX COM DLL that is created in VB6? This would hopefully allow us to code in .NET and still allow our "main" program to use it.
2). Is it possible to include references that were used in VB6 (the toolkit in this example) in .NET (even though it wasnt written for .NET)?

Any information would be helpful.

Thank you very much.

FGump
 
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