Visual Basic Concepts

Debugging, Testing, and Deploying Components

This chapter describes the procedures you’ll use to debug, register, and distribute your component, and the version compatibility features that allow you to enhance your component without breaking existing applications that use it.

In addition, you’ll find topics related to distributing components, including Help files, browser strings, and creating versions of your component for use internationally.

"General Principles of Component Design" contains a road map relating the topics covered in these two chapters to the general sequence of development tasks for components.

Topics

	Testing and Debugging ActiveX Components Creating a client project to test your component, plus in-process and out-of-process debugging techniques.
	Generating and Handling Errors in ActiveX Components How to return errors to clients that use your component, and how to handle errors from other components.
	Providing User Assistance for ActiveX Components Adding a Help file, linking objects and their interfaces to Help topics, and providing browser strings.
	Deploying ActiveX Components Using the Package and Deployment Wizard to create a Setup program for your component. Selecting a base address for your in-process component.
	Version Compatibility in ActiveX Components How version compatibility works, and how to ensure that existing clients can safely use new versions of your component.
	Localizing ActiveX Components Structuring your component so that it’s easy to create versions for other locales.

For More Information*   See "Debugging Your Code and Handling Errors," "International Issues," and "Distributing Your Applications" in the *Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide.