Original Article Date: Jan 7, 2002
Are you aware that certain features of MicroStation V8 requires some of the DLL's that come with Microsoft Internet Explorer? What are you going to do if you don't have IE or ... don't want to install IE? Read on.
According to MicroStation V8's ReadMe file, you'll need to ensure that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Version 5.0 or later) has been installed on your machine prior to installing MicroStation V8. Certain features of MicroStation V8, including MicroStation Link, the Word Processor text editor, OnLine Help and the Raster Manager have a dependency upon some of the dynamic link libraries (DLL's) that are delivered with IE version 5.0 and later. Bentley's Dan East explains: "A Word Processor is a very complex application that requires a full featured GUI control to display and edit the text in a WYSIWYG manner. As you probably know, MicroStation has its own set of GUI controls that were developed to provide cross-platform GUI support. And, in fact, several Bentley developed GUI controls were added for V8, such as the Tree, IconPopup, ToggleIcon and ColorChooser. But in the case of the Word Processor, instead of reinventing the wheel once again, we decided to focus our efforts on incorporating a Microsoft developed COM control, namely the Dynamic HTML control, into the MicroStation GUI framework. Now we have an HTML GUI control that supports both browsing and editing. It wasn't always easy, and on several occasions it was quite frustrating, but we feel it was the right decision, given the vast functionality we have at our disposal. The Microsoft DHTML control consists of the %windir%\MSHTML* files, which are part of IE 5.0 and later. The ATL.DLL file is also required." For those users who are adamant about not installing Microsoft IE, go and get the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ieak/techinfo/default.asp. This utility allows for the deployment and customization of Internet Explorer components including the installation of the DHTML control that MicroStation V8 requires.
AskInga Article #97