VB Forum / COM / November 2003

I think, you need to create two additional classes within your ActiveX
control project: one will work as collection of item and another one -
actual item.

For example, if you want to have syntax like this-MyControl.Buttons.Items,
then you should:
1. Place public property (or function) named Buttons in your Control's
module. This should return object of collection class (most obviously it
should be named as Buttons or ButtonsCol or something like this).
2. Class Buttons should have public property Item (usually it is specified
as default one), which returns object of class Button. Class Buttons should
contain internal collection of objects of class Button (usually implemented
with use of standard VB Collection). You probably want to implement other
traditional "collectional" functionality, like Add, Remove, NewEnum. These
are routings, which are located in the Buttons class.
3.You should have class Button, which has all appropriate props, methods and
events (For example, Caption,Text,Background and so on).

Since I don't know what actually you are going to do I can't tell you how
you should implement it further. You probably will put some standard control
on your UserControl, give it Index=0 (to use it like control array) and
alter its appearance in response on changes in Button object.
You can even avoid creation of class Button and use array of standard
CommandButtons (I use it just for example - it can be any other control) to
be stored in the Buttons collection. In this case in you Add and Remove
method you will use Load and Unload statements (or Visible property for
control with Index=0).

There are a lot of different ways (and related issues) to make it. Read VB
documentation related to Collection classes. There are definitely specifics
of using it for Control creation, but idea is still the same.

Good luck.
Dmitriy Antonov.