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Mon, 08 Aug 2005

[09:21] VB6 IDE and the Mousewheel
Date: 8/8/05 at 5:21PM

A long time ago I used to work with the VB6 Integrated Development Environment a lot. My biggest irk with the environmetn was that, for some reason it did not support the mousewheel events. You can't scroll the page up or down. This was back in the days when mouse wheels were still new fandagldness and in the end I ended up using a cool little application called FlyWheel by a mob named Plannet Crafters. They've disappeared now but FlyWheel is still out there.

I came back to the VB6 IDE recently as it is packaged with Microsoft Office (up until Office XP anyway) and it is what you get to write your fancy macros in Excel and Word in. I was violently surprised to find that the mouswheel STILL doesn't work. "Surely this cannot be" I thunk. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to fix the problem but not to include what I would have thought would be a required usability fix. Anyway, you can download the required executable, vb6mousewheel.exe or go and check out the page from the Knowledgebase, Article 837910 - Mouse wheel events do not work in the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE. It's a pretty easy install and is described on the page but basically all you need to do is:


  1. Download the file (it's a self-extracting archive) and run it. Say Yes to the "Can Microsoft own all your propertity in perpituity" box and extract it somewhere easy. I chucked it in c:\wutemp\c.
  2. Go to c:\wutemp\c and copy the file VB6IDEMouseWheelAddin.dll to C:\Windows\System32 or C:\WINNT\System32 or whatever magical DLL directory you've got in your %PATH% that you care to use. I will call this directory Magical_Directory from now on to avoid confusion.
  3. Close the IDE and anything that runs it (ie Word or Excel, not sure if Access has its own IDE these days)
  4. Pop open a cmd window (Start > Run > cmd)
  5. Type regsvr32 Magical_Directory\VB6IDEMouseWheelAddin.dll. You should get a little window pop up saying "DLLRegisterServer in Magical_Directory\VB6IDEMouseWheelAddin.dll succeeded.". Hit the OK button.
  6. Start Excel or Word or whatever and open the IDE (in Excel it's Tools > Macros > Visual Basic Editor).
  7. Click on Add-Ins in the menubar and then click Add-in Manager.
  8. You'll be given a little list of possible add-ins. Click on MouseWheel Fix so it's selected.
  9. Click to select the Loaded/Unloaded check box, and then click to select the Load on Startup check box.
  10. Click OK and you're done. Woohoo - welcome to the late ninties!!!


UPDATE: For the LOVE OF GOD....it doesn't work if you have multiple monitors and the IDE isn't on the primary monitor!!! I mean SERIOUSLY!!! Gaaaaaaah!

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