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Visual Basic and Dynamic Data Exchange: Controlling Windows Applications
Timothy L. Porter
Department of Physics
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
Jim Maxka end John Abes
Department of Chemistry
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
Commercially available molecular modeling programs have become increasingly popular as classroom tools in graduate and undergraduate chemistry courses. Many of these programs are Windows based, (1) and thus share a common application programming interface (API). Many also are DDE (dynamic data exchange) or OLE (object linking and embedding) enabled. This allows these programs to communicate and share data or objects with each other through the operating environment. One such program, HyperChem, (2) has become popular due to its research quality power as well as its ease of use. In this paper we describe general methods of controlling HyperChem through Visual Basic and DDE, thus extending the capability of this program for demonstration and classroom use.
While some of the DDE commands...