Visual Basic is based internally on the double-byte Unicode standard. However, most of the world outside of Visual Basic still uses the single- byte ANSI model. For this reason, Visual Basic provides two sets of form controls and uses the ANSI set as the default control. Any strings passed to the ANSI set of form controls will be converted from their internal Unicode representation to an ANSI representation and will not display the UNICODE strings correctly. To be able to display the UNICODE string on a Visual Basic form, the UNICODE (Forms 2.0) controls must be used. The following example shows how to use the Forms 2.0 controls to display UNICODE strings read from a Unicode text file. Because this behavior requires UNICODE language package support, it currently supported only in Windows NT.

NOTE: The Forms 2.0 controls used in this article were not designed for use on Visual Basic forms and have not been formally tested in the environment. This article documents their use only in this very limited context to work around a limitation to the Visual Basic Intrinsic controls. Using other features of these controls on Visual Basic forms is not supported.

Furthermore, Forms 2.0 is part of Microsoft Office and is not redistributable. Therefore, you cannot distribute Forms 2.0 (fm20.dll) with your application. It must already be on the target machines.

For additional information on distributing fm20.dll, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:...