Thanks for the response.
I was using VS 2008 myself but I was running into unicode compatibility issues, the same project 2008 would not compile works perfectly in 2003. I followed jemmyell's 'Mach3 Plugin Tutorial Document and Prototype File Set' and had no issues at all besides needing to add the off include to resolve a dependency. My customplugin is a perfect working version of that tutorial that I tried to add the hooks dll to.
I see in your object browser you can actually view the function blocks, in my other projects by adding them to the references they add to the object browser but I have had to manually add system,design,forms,hooks to the object browser manually. This might be normal but usually its automatic for me.
Can you offer any insight to why my null assignments don't work or to why I cannot create a text box?
Also since you can add the dll easily have you been able to initialize the hook object successfully by chance?? (the block of code in pic two)