A: An often overlooked, and certainly under-appreciated, method offered by VB forms and controls is OLE drag-and-drop. When the user drags something from most Microsoft applications (including from Internet Explorer), the application packages that something in an OLE DataObject. Your application can then examine this DataObject as the user drags it over your form or controls, and can offer feedback to the user indicating whether you'll accept it being dropped.

I've always found the most flexibility in taking direct control over operations such as this. Set the OLEDropMode of the objects that accept drops to vbOLEDropManual. With this setting, VB fires the associated object's OLEDragOver event whenever the user drags a DataObject over the object. You can test the DataObject in the OLEDragOver event to see if it contains data you're interested in. For a URL, use the DataObject's GetData method to retrieve its raw text contents.

Figure 1. Provide Good Feedback.

The component that packages the DataObject initially also sets what "effect" the user sees when over an OLE drop target (see Figure 1). If you don't find what you're looking for in the DataObject when OLEDragOver fires—in this case, a URL—set Effect to vbDropEffectNone and return from the event. If the DataObject appears to contain something of interest (a URL), your first instinct might be to return vbDropEffectCopy as the desired Effect. However, this might not be appropriate in some cases.

How you set Effect determines what feedback the user receives. But you can't set Effect to a value not set initially by the DataObject's packager. OLE's IDropTarget interface offers one type not exposed by VB's type library: DROPEFFECT_LINK, which has a value of 4. You can test for this type specifically, or you can test the text itself to see if it "looks good" (see Listing 1). The Effect parameter is a bitfield, and you can't set it to values not turned on already, so the easiest answer is to leave it alone as long as the DataObject seems to contain appropriate data. —K.E.P.

Updated Code Samples

•  NetUrl

About the Author
Karl E. Peterson is a GIS analyst with a regional transportation-planning agency and serves as a member of the Visual Studio Magazine Technical Review and Editorial Advisory Boards. Online, he's a Microsoft MVP and a section leader on several VSM forums. Find more of Karl's VB samples at www.mvps.org/vb.