.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Inheriting from Other Controls

Because inheritance is central to the way controls work in the Windows Forms framework, we are not limited to deriving from forms or composite controls. In principle, we can use any control as a base class (unless it has marked itself as sealed in C# or NonInheritable in VB, but very few controls do this). We must live without the convenience of visual editing when deriving from other control types, but of course that is also the case when we write custom controls.

The usual reason for inheriting from some non-composite control (e.g., one of the built-in controls) is to provide a version of that control with some useful extra feature. For example, we will see later how to add an autocompletion facility to the TextBox control. As always, it is crucially important only to use inheritance where it makes sense—developers must be able to use our derived control just as they would use the base control.

Visual Studio .NET does not provide a direct way of creating a new derived control with a non-composite base class. However, it is reasonably easy to get started: simply add a new Custom Control to the project, delete the OnPaint method it supplies, and change the base class from Control to whichever control class you want to derive from. Alternatively, just create a new normal class definition from scratch that inherits from the base class of your choice. (These two techniques are exactly equivalent. Although it is more straightforward just to create a normal ...