SharpStyle Neutron

As I was preparing for tutorial of using SharpStyle Neutron to develop an ActionScript project and Windows Forms within one solution, I ran into the following issue: while there are a number of references on the web on how to use Flash OCX within Visual Studio 2003, there are only a handful of results related to Visual Studio 2005 and most of them document the problems that people are having.

Following the steps from this article (Macromedia – Developer Center Embedding Macromedia Flash Player in a C# Application) produce the following errors:

• There is a popup stating that VS ”Failed to import the ActiveX control.  Please ensure it is properly registered“
• If you examine Error List, under Warnings, you will see the following

Could not resolve dependent COM reference “stdole, Version=7.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”.  

Failed to create the wrapper assembly for type library “AxShockwaveFlashObjects”. Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ComReferenceResolutionException’ was thrown.

The referenced component ‘AxShockwaveFlashObjects’ could not be found. Failed to create the wrapper assembly for type library “AxShockwaveFlashObjects”. Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ComReferenceResolutionException’ was thrown. 

I found the following Unable to add Flash 8 control in VS2005 – Tentative workaround blog post from 2005-12-07, but the instructions there didn’t work. After doing a few more searches I found the following forum page in French (translated page / original page)

Here is what needs to be done:

• Open Visual Studio 2005 command prompt and execute the following:
  • aximp.exe -source “C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\Flash9b.ocx”
• This will generate the following files. Items in bold are the important ones:
  • AxShockwaveFlashObjects.dll
  • AxShockwaveFlashObjects.pdb
  • ShockwaveFlashObjects.dll
  • AxShockwaveFlashObjects.cs

• In Visual Studio, add the references to the 2 dlls generated by aximp (I copied them from “C:\Program FIles\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC” to the root of the project): 

• Add namespaces to the imports section

using AxShockwaveFlashObjects;
using ShockwaveFlashObjects;

• And here is some sample code to display SWF

AxShockwaveFlash axShockwaveFlash = new AxShockwaveFlash();
axShockwaveFlash.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(50, 50);   

this.Controls.Add (axShockwaveFlash);
//this.Show(); // Avoids InvalidActiveXStateException.

axShockwaveFlash.Movie = "D:\\test.swf";
//* it is important to set Size after specifying Movie property
//* if Size is specified before, it is ignored
axShockwaveFlash.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(20, 20);
axShockwaveFlash.Play();

References:

• Macromedia – Developer Center Embedding Macromedia Flash Player in a C# Application to Display Stock Information – an outdated article about embedding Flash Player in a C# Application using Visual Studio 2003
• Unable to add Flash 8 control in VS2005 – Tentative workaround – post from 2005-12-07 that outlines the issue. Provided workaround didn’t work for me. Might be related to the fact that I have Service Pack 1 for VS installed
• Add Flash to Your .NET WinForms to Create Skinable UIs – an older article from 2004 with source code. Didn’t try it.
• Re Faied to import the ActiveX control. (Load Macromedia Flash) – MSDN Forums – post on MSDN forums with a link to the following article: User Interface Controls in Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic 2005. Article talks about upgrading VB6 project to VB.NET 2005.

~Mike