The
Message Spy VBX custom control was our first shareware custom control, and also
one of our most popular. With the VBX standard now effectively defunct, we at
Anton Software are pleased to release the control's version 2.4 source code. We
hope it proves to be of some historical interest within the Microsoft
developer community.
Message Spy is essentially a "subclassing" control. It was devised as a means of providing Visual Basic developers with capabilities normally only available to C and C++ developers. The following is its original product description:
| "Message Spy is a VBX custom control used for 'spying' on Windows and Visual Basic messages received by Visual Basic controls and forms. It fires an event when a message is received, passing the message details and the actual control or form for which the message was intended. All messages can be spied upon, or just a single specified message. Message numbers need never be used, as message names are acceptable in all places. All message and string lookups are highly optimised for maximum performance. Both pre-processing and post-processing of messages are supported." |
The control was built using our Skeleton VBX Developers' Toolkit. This, too, we later released as shareware.
Note: VBX custom controls are supported by 16-bit versions of Visual Basic only. This includes Visual Basic versions 1.0 to version 4.0 (16-bit) only. Applications developed using these versions of Visual Basic are compatible with Windows 3.x, 9x, NT and 2000.