First, if anything in this guide is unclear to you, please feel free to contact our support team. We are usually able to answer our customer's questions in 24 hours or less.

DESIGN-TIME:

Add the control to your current project as you would with any other ActiveX control in your current development environment.

Once inserted, the control will appear in its default state. In order to change its appearance and behavior right-click and select the Properties item from the contextual menu. The control's property sheet will appear as follows.

From this property sheet you can choose from the following options:

Pressing the Edit properties... button will launch the 3D Button Visual Editor application that will not only allow changing most of the button's settings but also a full control over the button behaviour in its available states (Pressed, Mouse over, Disabled, etc.).

After having edited the button with your preferred settings, you can save or discard the new button's settings closing the application.

RUN-TIME:

The control's appearance and behavior can also be modified at run-time. For those using the product within the C++ environment, the download package includes a module named 3dabm8.h that will help you with the mnemonic constants required by the control. This module can be found inside the Include directory created by the setup package (the default is C:\Program files\MultiMedia Soft\3D Active Button Magic\include).

As explained below, the demo modules for Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic.NET and Visual C# (that were available until version 6 of the control) have been discontinued due to the new internal object-oriented design of the control. Go to the How to use Mnemonic Constants section for details.

Using the control inside Microsoft Visual C++.NET

The use of ActiveX controls within projects developed using Visual C++.NET and MFC creates particular issues users must be aware of: as for Visual C++ 6.0, ActiveX controls require wrapper classes in order to be used in this environment. Usually these wrapper classes are generated automatically by the environment but, due to a bug inside Visual C++.NET, the wrapper class will result incomplete when dealing with ActiveX controls that, in order to maintain backward compatibility, alternates identifiers of properties and methods. For this reason our control comes with its already generated C++ wrapper classes, installed by the setup package inside the "include" directory (by default the complete path should be C:\Program files\MultiMedia Soft\3D Active Button Magic\\include\wrappers\cpp.net). This issue implies to perform some manual action when creating a variable associated to the control. We recommend integrating these wrapper classes into your projects using the following procedure: