.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Summary

Visual Studio .NET provides visual editing for all controls and property editing for any kind of component without requiring any special effort from the developers of those components. It also provides those developers with many ways of enhancing the design-time behavior of their components. This usually involves writing a special designer class that is associated with the component and manages most design-time aspects of that component’s behavior. A designer class can add extra commands to the Forms Designer user interface, it can modify the drag-and-drop editing behavior, it can add its own adornments for visual editing, and it can extend and modify the set of properties seen at design time. It is also possible to write an extender provider, a component that extends the properties available on other components.