In VB3, if you wanted to display a list box adjacent to anothercontrol such as a PictureBox on a sizable form, you were confrontedwith the problem that a list box’s height was constrained to anintegral number of list items. By using a series of Windows andVB API calls (requiring a special DLL, such as Desaware’s SpyWorks),you could destroy an existing list-box control, reset its stylebits to include LBS_NOINTEGRALHEIGHT, and re-create the control,which could then be resized to any height.

The IntegralHeight property is now included in the standard anddata-bound list controls, so you’ll get the expected behaviorwith automatic resizing tools such as VideoSoft’s Elastic. TheDBList and DBCombo also include a VisibleCount property that returnsthe number of visible items in the list.