>Hello Everybody,
>
>The company that I work for has a flagship product written in Visual Basic 6 that displays
>analog and digital data on circular and linear gauges. These gauges are rather dull in
>appearence and I was given the task of making the interface "pretty".
>
>I scoured the internet for circular and linear gauge activex controls and did not find any
>that I thought were "pretty", however when I scoured the internet for circular and linear
>gauge .NET controls, I found quite a few.
>
>It is my understanding that these .NET controls can only be used with a .NET language like
>VB.NET, but converting our flagship product to VB.NET would not be practical since it has
>many lines of code.
>
>I did some research and found that it would be possible to write a class in VB.NET that
>would have forms that contains these .NET controls and then call this class from Visual Basic 6.
>
>A coworker suggested that I look into HTML5 controls. The idea here is to design the circular or
>linear gauge using some designer that would save the gauge in HTML5 format and then
>reference it with the Web Browser control placed on a form in Visual Basic 6.
>
>I actually magaged to do this.
>
>If I wanted to reference the HTML5 control at run time such as the pointer value, I would have
>to use the Document Object Model.
>
>The question that I have is, has anyone out there ever dome anything like this. I know it is
>possible to display the gauge I created in the Web Browser of Visual Basic 6, but how would I
>reference the Document Object Model?
>
>Can anyone there refer me to any books on this subject?
>
>Can anyone out there recommend some really good HTML5 controls?

As you discovered it is easy to expose a VB.NET module as a COM dll - so simple to incorporate it into a VB6 app. Might even be worth considering this approach even if you use html to render the controls. .NET has a WebBrowser class that exposes a HTMLDocument object. IIRC accessing the DOM from VB6 was a bit clunky.....