Time to retire your Active X Controls! You've got 5 years!

⏳ The clock is now official: you have 4.5 years to get your ActiveX controls out of your OpenEdge applications.

📢 On Wednesday, Progress officially confirmed the end of 32-bit Windows support in OpenEdge. Version 13.2 drops the 32-bit runtime, and 12.8 — the last LTS release that still ships 32-bit — retires in about 4.5 years. That retirement date is the real deadline for every OpenEdge GUI application that still depends on 32-bit-only ActiveX / OCX controls.

⚠️ Here's why this matters more than it first looks. Yes, the 64-bit client can host ActiveX controls — if a 64-bit build of the control exists. In practice, many vendors never shipped one, and plenty of those vendors are gone or no longer maintain the control. Where there's no 64-bit OCX, there is nothing to "just recompile against." The dependency has to be removed, not ported. And ActiveX removal has a habit of surfacing coupling deep in your window logic that nobody remembered was there. 4.5 years sounds generous. It isn't, if you start late.

✅ The good news: you don't have to choose between "risky rewrite" and "do nothing." There are proven migration paths, and both major targets are fully supported in the SmartComponent Library:

• 🌐 Web / browser-based UI — the right call when your long-term target is a web frontend anyway. The biggest change, but also the one that pays off well beyond the 32-bit deadline.

• 🖥️ GUI for .NET — move onto a control stack that is natively 64-bit, with modern, supported .NET controls replacing the retired ActiveX ones. For incremental migration you can even embed the existing ABL GUI window in a .NET form and overlay .NET controls, swapping out ActiveX controls in place without rewriting the whole window.

🤖 And this is the part that has genuinely changed the economics: modernization has never been this achievable, because of AI-assisted development. The repetitive, error-prone parts of this work — inventorying and mapping controls, rewriting event handlers, restructuring window logic, wiring up the new UI — are exactly what AI tooling is now very good at. We're not talking about shaving a percentage off the effort. In the projects we're running, AI is cutting modernization time by factors. 🚀 Work that used to be pure mechanical overhead is now a fraction of the cost, which changes which projects are worth doing at all.

💡 We do this. We have real, hands-on experience using AI to modernize OpenEdge GUI and character (TTY) applications into browser-based frontends on the SmartComponent Library — the architectural decisions still need a human, but the grind no longer does.

🔍 So the practical advice: start the inventory now. Find out which ActiveX controls you actually depend on, and which of those have no 64-bit future. That's a small, low-risk first step — and it tells you exactly how big your 2030 problem really is.

📩 Talk to us. Let's look at how AI can accelerate your OpenEdge modernization project — before the deadline starts making the decisions for you.

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