Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Adding Controls and Components

When you are building a form-based application, the user interface design really involves three separate tools within Visual Studio: the Forms Designer tool, which provides the canvas for the form; the Toolbox, which contains the controls to be placed onto the canvas; and the property browser, which is used to affect the form and its child controls, appearance, and behavior. This triad of IDE tools provides the key to rapid form construction with Visual Studio, especially as it relates to building a form’s content.

The term control technically refers to any .NET object that implements the Controlclass. In practice, we use the term to refer to the visual controls hosted by a form. This is in contrast to a component, ...