Windows 95 appearance in embedded web browser?

[Bob Whitefield]

When using the embedded Internet Explorer OLE control (Shell.Explorer.2), controls such as entry fields and buttons have the old Windows 95 look, not the newer Common Controls 6 look for XP, Vista and Windows 7. Note the appearance of buttons and dropdown menus in the browser area of this simple example:



Setting the abt.exe.manifest file to enable Common Controls 6 causes native widgets in Smalltalk to have the newer look, but has no effect on the OLE control.

The same behavior is also seen in Dolphin and Delphi, so it's not unique to VA Smalltalk. A Visual Basic app using the same control adopts the newer look, but VB also generates additional DLLs which are presumably responsible:



Has anyone succeeded in configuring the embedded browser so it has the newer appearance?

[jtuchel]

I would *guess* that this is not really related to VAST, but to the version of the OLE-control you are using. If I remember correctly from my (whew, very old) VBA experimements, VB hides the version number from the users and only shows you Shell.Explorer with no further info.

So maybe you just need to find out whether there is another incarnation of the same control which is newer.

as I said, just a guess

Joachim

[Bob Whitefield]

Joachim,

The version of Shell.Explorer.2 is 1.1. The versions are the same on XP and Windows 7 machines. The file is IEFRAME.DLL, dated December 2009 on both systems.

Registry key for the Shell.Explorer.2 CLSID is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2}.

So I don't think there's a newer version, but thanks very much for the suggestion. It may well be that there's no way to make the OLE control use the newer appearance, just thought I'd ask in case someone had made it work.

[tc]

I looked at Quicken 2009 which has an online browser. Wikipedia says the Quicken browser is not a shell (activex) but does use trident to render its html.

The widgets are the old style controls but the same web page in IE8 uses the newer style controls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_shell

Other applications that aren't primarily for web browsing, such as Intuit's Quicken and QuickBooks, AOL, Winamp, Steam, and RealPlayer, use the rendering engine to provide a limited-functionality "mini" browser within their own user interfaces.

--tc

[Bob Whitefield]

Asking this question in an MSDN forum, I received this helpful, if terse, advice:

Implement IDocHostUIHandler (the details depend on which framework you use for ActiveX hosting), make sure to return DOCHOSTUIFLAG_THEME flag from GetHostInfo.

So my next question is, can interface IDocHostUIHandler be implemented in VASt, and if so, can anyone point me to an example of code that does something similar?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753260(VS.85).aspx

Or is using this DLL a possibility?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/183235

Thanks,
Bob