ActiveX weirdness will make you pull your hair out.

Note: Non-developers can skip this post completely.

If you’ve ever had to make an ActiveX application run within a web page, then you know how frustrating it can be to get it working, much less try to debug the $!&@# thing. If you’re building it with .Net, it’s even more of a pain.

What do you do in this situation: You’ve read through the available online tutorials (which I will not list, since they’re all somewhat incorrect in one aspect or another) and have had the app working at one time or another, you may still have the “missing/broken” section appearing on your web page instead of your nice new application after you’ve made a change. You’ve cleared your IE cache, restarted IE and may have even rebooted your computer trying to get your app to re-appear. You’ve done just about everything and it’s still broken.

Well, the simple answer is that there’s an error in the app itself. Apparently everything has to run super-smooth in order for IE to even display the app. Comment-out the stuff you’ve changed or throw some try-catch blocks in there. Rebuild the app, clear your IE cache, restart IE, and see if your app appears.