James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
After enduring installing the control of 2 floppy disks (!), an unnecessarily long animation that I could not get out of, and having to download the service pack (which was not included with the product) in order to resolve a version conflict on my PC, I finally got started.
After a few minutes, I was already frustrated with the process (and the fact that I had to read the manual to work out how to use it!). The tutorial introduced you to the basics, and then left you with 3 pages of menu items to create.. not the best of starts. The interface for creating your menu and toolbar is unintuitive and buggy. You first need to create menu items under categories. You then need to create the main . You then need to create popup menu categories for each menu, and then copy the menu items over to associate it with each popup menu. In some ways, it is probably best to create your menus using the VB menu editor, and then use their capture facility to convert it into an ActiveBar (though you will need to compile it to an EXE first...)
The menu designer...
The technical support went quiet when I asked how I could set shortcut keys for menu items without them being scrambled, ignored or removed.
However, on a different note, once you have successfully navigated the mine field of creating your menus, the control is actually very good. There has obviously been a lot of work put into the end result. All toolbars are fully dockable, items can be customized, animation effects, personalized menus, and drop down toolbar items if they don't fit on the screen. Dockable windows can also be created, however, again this is more difficult than it should be.
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