Building Windows Forms Controls and Components with Rich Design-Time Features

摘要

Visual Studio .NET provides support for designing rich features into your controls and components, allowing you to set properties, set form placement, inherit from base classes, and much more. So how does Visual Studio .NET do all this? What does the Windows Forms designer do? What's the difference between a control and a component? How does Visual Studio integrate your controls so that they can access features of the .NET Framework? In this article, the authors answer these common questions by building a clock control and taking the reader along for the ride. In building the control, hosts and containers are illustrated, the property browser is explained, debugging is discussed, and a general overview of the design-time infrastructure is presented.