Mastering Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 12. Building Custom Windows Controls

Just as you can design custom classes, you can use Visual Studio to design custom controls. The process is very similar, in the sense that custom controls have properties, methods, and events, which are implemented with code that's identical to the code you'd use to implement these members with classes. The difference is that controls have a visual interface and interact with the user. In short, you must provide the code to draw the control's surface, as well as react to selected user actions from within the control's code.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to enhance the functionality of existing controls, a common practice among developers. You've already seen in the preceding chapter how to inherit ...