I need to dynamically create and persist the state of ActiveX controls. The Visual Studio designer can do this at design time, but I need to be able to do it at run time. I need some pointers on how to dynamically load a control into an AxHost wrapper and using the AxHost wrapper to serialize the OCXState of the wrapped control. Any assistance would be most appreciated.

Here is a little more detail on what I am trying to do:

I am writing a tool to translate VB6 to .NET. I want to transform an arbitrary block of property bag data for an ActiveX control (in an FRM/CTL file) to a well-formed and valid block of OCXState data in a resx file?

What are the rules or conventions governing how VB6 and a given ActiveX control collaborate to write/read the FRM/CTL files?

Is it possible to implement a general solution to this problem?

The conceptual design of what I want to do is as follows:

1) interpret the Ax control's property bag data in the FRM file (possibly with the help of the original control – how?),

2) instantiate an AxHost wrapped instance of the ActiveX control,

3) initialize the instance with the data from the property bag

3) use AxHost methods to persist the OCXState data to a Resx file.

Problem is, sometimes, I cannot get passed the first step. Sometimes the property bag contains array notation for repeating elements; sometimes there are numbers appended to the ends of members; sometimes the property bag contains entries (e.g. NumItems) that to not correspond to any member in the control interface. There does not seem to be any rules.

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