Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Creating a New Component or Control

Starting from an existing WinForms project, you kick off the process of authoring a component by using the Add New Item dialog box (from the Project menu). Selecting Component Class in this dialog box adds the stub code file to your current project and launches the component designer. To start control development, you use the Add New User Control dialog box.

Note

Essentially two different “types” of WinForms controls can be authored within Visual Studio: custom controls and user controls. Custom controls inherit directly from the System.Windows.Forms.Control class; they are typically code intensive because you, the developer, are responsible for writing all the code necessary to render the control’s visual ...