Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Authoring WinForms Components and Controls

Referring to our earlier discussion of Windows forms, components are non-visual controls or classes. This is a good generic definition, but a more specific one is this: A component is any class that inherits from System.ComponentModel.IComponent. This particular interface provides support for designability and resource handling. If you need a designable control that does not have a user interface of its own, you work with a component. Controls are similar in function but not form; a control is a reusable chunk of code that does have a visual element to it.

Because Visual Studio provides a dedicated design surface for creating Windows Forms components, we cover this separately in this section. WPF projects ...