March 18th, 2010

ActiveX Test Container Application is Still Available

Hello, I’m Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team.  I’ve noticed some posts on various forums lamenting the loss of the ActiveX Test Container application and I wanted to address those concerns.

The ActiveX Text Container tool is still available as a sample in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.  It is included in the Visual C++ samples ZIP file included with Visual Studio:

·         For VS2008, it’s in [Program Files]\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Samples\1033\AllVCLanguageSamples.zip

·         For VS2010, it’s in [Program Files]\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Samples\1033\VC2010Samples.zip

The sample is named TSTCON and is in the C++\MFC\OLE\TstCon folder in the ZIP file.  You can build this sample and run it to test the functionality of your ActiveX controls.

Note that there is a problem with the sample in Visual Studio 2008.  After building the application, running it will give an error message because “the application configuration is incorrect”.  To fix this, change the “Enable User Account Control” property on the Linker / Manifest File property page for the TCProps project to No (as in the screen shot below) and rebuild the solution.  You will need to do this for all configurations and platforms that you want to run.  Once you do so, the tool will run (in both Win32 and x64 configurations) without issue.

For Visual Studio 2010, the sample was converted to the new Visual C++ build system (based on MSBuild) and the problematic setting was removed during the conversion.  So for Visual Studio 2010, the sample builds and runs (in both Win32 and x64 configurations) without issue.

This tool was removed from the set of tools shipped with Visual Studio 2008 for a couple of reasons:

·         The code base is fairly old, and had not been maintained on a consistent basis, so there were some bugs in the tool but no resources available to fix them.

·         The perception was that the tool was no longer widely used by our customers, so shipping it as a sample was thought to be sufficient.

More information about the sample can be found here.

I hope you find this information helpful.  Feel free to ask any questions you have and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Pat Brenner

Visual C++ Libraries Development

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