AxFormExtender is an ActiveX control that adds a few of the things that you might think are missing from a standard VB form. Its purpose is to extend the capabilities of its hosting form by adding some properties, methods, and events that relate directly to how the form is interacted with.

AxFormExtender Main Features

• AutoPosition allows a form to automatically keep track of its size and location information on the screen so that each time a form is brought up it is placed in the same orientation as it was last used. AutoPosition is effortless yet extendable. Once AxFormExtender is dropped onto a Form, AutoPosition is enabled and functioning without doing anything else! It's flexible enough to fit any application as you can customize where the position information is stored registry as well as customize how AutoPosition works. Want to know when your form has been AutoPosition'ed? There's an AutoPositionComplete event to notify you. Users of Windows applications have come to expect this behavior--why waste time doing it yourself when it "comes for free" with AxFormExtender.
• AxFormExtender adds the capability of providing minimum/maximum height and width for your form. Not only does that make your resizing tasks easier, but users will know the limits of their sizing extents while they are resizing the form. You can even bind the mouse so that users can't take the mouse cursor off of your form.
• Want to make your form always float on top of other forms, even when it's not the active form? With AxFormExtender it couldn't be easier. Set the AlwaysOnTop property and forget about it!
• Visual Basic provides ways to get rid of the close button, but try to find a way to disable the close button... AxFormExtender picks up Visual Basic's slack and adds a CloseButtonEnabled property to complete the suite.
• AxFormExtender includes several form positioning tools like CenterToScreen, Explode, and Implode, and ForceToForeground. There are also ways to do some special effects like making the form transparent, flashing the title bar, and even tiling a picture onto the background of the form.
• Have you ever wished that forms had a Show event or a Hide event? What about a way to tell when a form had been activated/deactivated due to application switching? AxFormExtender adds 9 new "form level" events to fill in some of the gaps: FormShow, FormHide, FormMove, FormStartSizing, FormStopSizing, FormWindowChangeState, AppActivate, AppDeactivate, and MouseWheelMoved.

Shipping

AxFormExtender is shipped as two separate OCX's: AxFormEx5.ocx and AxFormEx6.ocx. The two files are binary compatible and support the exact same feature set. The only difference is that AxFormEx5.ocx is designed to use the Visual Basic 5.0 runtime libraries and AxFormEx6.ocx uses the Visual Basic 6.0 runtimes. You should use the appropriate version in your application to avoid having to distribute additional runtime files. Also included is a complete HTMLHelp documentation.