ActiveX - Class Not Licensed For Use

[oldshaghat]

I have a development machine that has an installation of Visual Studio 6.0. I was tinkering about in LabView with an ActiveX control to call the MS Common Dialogs, in particular the FileOpen and FileSave dialogs, with more control over filtering (as a sometime replacement for the LV FileDialog vi). MS Common Dialog utilizes the ocx control "comdlg32.ocx". The vi worked great on my development machine. I brought the vi over to a different machine that has a copy of this ocx (and the dll's etc) in what appears to be the appropriate places, but the vi now returns an error, that the Class is not licensed for use.

I've been searching for solutions to this apparent licensing problem all day. I'm not sure, but it appears that there is something that installing VB does to enable the "design time" version of the active X control instead of the "runtime" version of the control, which leads to the question, which version does LabView see? I'm able to see and create automation references to this library on the machine where it doesn't work, and in fact a number of other activeX controls chosen at random returned the same error. I've looked everywhere for a clue - the registry, security settings, properties, version differences, but nothing obvious has shown up.

There was a reference in one place on MSDN to a license pack - but I can't find any evidence that I've got a license pack on the machine that works. Has anyone come across this error? Is it an actual license issue on the MS side or a activeX issue or a LabView issue?

[biker2000]

Take a look at this Microsoft article. It seems like that your (licensed) control came with VB. Further on:
The CommonDialog control is a licensed control that ships with Visual Basic (VB) 5.0. Only developers with a valid design-time license for the control may distribute the control for use in their applications or on their Web sites. The control and design-time license can be obtained by downloading the VB 5.0 Control Creation Edition (VBCCE), purchasing VB 5.0, or purchasing Visual InterDev.

Thus, you could install the VBCCE one every system you want to deploy. Unfortunately, VBCCE is pretty big (7.3 MB) just to get the licensed control...


-B2k

[oldshaghat]

So I guess the question is (1) does LabView require a design time or a run time license to instantiate these sorts of active X controls (it appears to be the former)
and (2) what reasonable licensing options are there? There is a lpk file I can generate, but that is more targeted to embedding controls in html - I noted the existance of the licdll class in the activeX creatable objects, with a promising name like "COM License Manager", but I can't figure out what it does - and I can't find any documentation on it on MSDN. As you point out, a 7.3 Mb install is right out.

If I write a CIN module to directly call the dll, that should also solve it, I think. But that's kind of more work than I want to consider at this point.