Visual Basic and ActiveX?

Dylbert asks: "Putting aside my gripes about using Microsoft products in the workplace (or anywhere, for that matter), I was wondering if any Slashdot users have found ways to overcome the forced use of ActiveX when creating DLLs in Visual Basic. Because my work uses a few seperate programming languages to write code in, the use of ActiveX would mean we will have to convert all our existing code to the same ActiveX architecture which I believe is unnecessary. Any suggestions?"