ActiveX Control

"ActiveX control" is a term used to denote reusable software components that are based on Microsoft Component Object Model (COM). ActiveX controls provide encapsulated reusable functionality to programs and they are typically but not always visual in nature. For example, an ActiveX control might implement spreadsheet functionality similar to Microsoft Excel, which would be visual in nature, but it also might implement functionality to upload or download files from an FTP site, which is not visual in nature unless it incorporates some sort of download progress display or similar.
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