Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Type Converters

When you select a component on a design surface, the entries in the Property Browser are rendered from the design-time control instance. When you edit properties in the Property Browser, the component's design-time instance is updated with the new property values. This synchronicity isn't as straightforward as it seems, however, because the Property Browser displays properties only as text, even though the source properties can be of any type. As values shuttle between the Property Browser and the design-time instance, they must be converted back and forth between the string type and the type of the property.

Enter the type converter, the translator droid of .NET, whose main goal in life is to convert between types. For string-to-type ...