Which VB6 controls are supported by Microsoft?

I'm looking for a replacement for the Sheridan 3D Panel (ssPanel) and I'm trying to figure out which of the Controls in the Projects>Components I can add to my project which will be supported by Microsoft. (I.e., I don't want to add a control that MS doesn't officially "support", like the MS Fo开发者_开发百科rms 2.0 Object Library).

Update Microsoft does still support VB6 (or at least the files that it uses)

There is no list of supported controls: you have to look at the list of supported OCX files in the Microsoft Support Statement for VB6. You need to figure out which controls are in those OCXs. You could start a new VB6 project, tick the OCXs in Project-Components, and see which controls become available in the toolbar.

Confession I have made this answer Community Wiki, because this information was originally in a comment to another answer, but that answer is now deleted. Feel slightly guilty as I downvoted the answer (it said VB6 is unsupported which is misleading).

What part of the SSPanel behaviour do you need?

• If it's the custom appearances (raised 3D edge etc.) it's not too hard to write a user control based on the intrinsic VB6 Label and Line controls. Have a look at the edge of the SSPanel in the magnified screenshot below. It's just a one pixel border. The colours are system colours: left and top are "button highlight" &H80000014& and the right and bottom are "button shadow" &H80000010&. Put four line controls in a user control and write code in the resize event to move them to the edge of the control.

alt text http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/5376/sspanelzoomin.png

• If you need a label that can act as a container, you could make your user control capable of being a container (set ControlContainer True).

• Vertically centred text. Offhand I don't know a good way to do that. Google is suggesting creating a user control with a PictureBox and using the TextHeight method.

EDIT There's another approach, which I'm using in some of my projects. Just continue to use the SSPanel despite it's being unsupported and with awareness of its various problems. It does seem to work fine on Vista and XP - haven't tested yet on Windows 7.

Just as a side note to expand on MarkJ's thought (I realize this question is a little old, but I recently had to deal with porting some old VB apps): There are some cases where SSPanel is used as a container with background colors, and without text. Although it may seem like stating the obvious, the Forms.Panel does work fairly well class to avoid the "Sheridan 3D Controls" dependency and make distribution easier in these simple cases.

The VB.net converter tool may generate something like:

Public WithEvents ssPanel As AxThreed.AxSSPanel
Me.ssPanel = New AxThreed.AxSSPanel
ssPanel.OcxState = CType(resources.GetObject("ssPanel.OcxState"),
                         System.Windows.Forms.AxHost.State)
CType(Me.ssPanel, System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize).EndInit()

Which is easily changed to:

Friend WithEvents ssPanel As System.Windows.Forms.Panel
me.ssPanel = New System.Windows.Forms.Panel
' No longer necessary:
' ssPanel.OcxState
' CType(Me.ssPanel, System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize).EndInit()

A comment from MarkJ made me re-read the Q, and from "replacement" I now understand this is likely a re-code/new version project, not a start from scratch... the original answer below is not accouting for that. Meanwhile, MS says it's suportting a core runtime file of a language that has no roadmap or committed resources (?), so bottom-line of my answer still stands: vb6 stopped, new projects can go Python, vb.app, java, c++, C#, whatever.

Original: None. VB6.0 reached its End-Of-Life. Go Python! or Java, or C#... never vb .net, because it's tons harder/dense than Java, not VB6.0 syntax in the slightest, and the learning curve is just a notch under C#.

P.S. It's so interesting to have negative votes because I trashed vb .net when compared to java or c#. I wonder what these guys would think of me, being a former vb6 programmer, and not moving to any of the .net flavors.