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Develop Windows Forms controls at design time

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For control authors, the .NET Framework provides a wealth of control authoring technology. Authors are no longer limited to designing composite controls that act as a collection of preexisting controls. Through inheritance, you can create your own controls from preexisting composite controls or preexisting Windows Forms controls. You can also design your own controls that implement custom painting. These options enable a great deal of flexibility to the design and functionality of the visual interface. To take advantage of these features, you should be familiar with object-based programming concepts.

Note

It is not necessary to have a thorough understanding of inheritance, but you may find it useful to refer to Inheritance basics (Visual Basic).

If you want to create custom controls to use on Web Forms, see Developing Custom ASP.NET Server Controls.

In this section

Walkthrough: Authoring a Composite Control
Shows how to create a simple composite control in C#.

Walkthrough: Inheriting from a Windows Forms Control
Shows how to create a simple Windows Forms control using inheritance in C#.

Walkthrough: Perform common tasks using designer actions
Shows how to use the smart tag feature on Windows Forms controls.

Walkthrough: Serializing Collections of Standard Types with the DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute
Shows how to use the DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.Content attribute to serialize a collection.

Walkthrough: Debugging Custom Windows Forms Controls at Design Time
Shows how to debug the design-time behavior of a Windows Forms control.

Walkthrough: Creating a Windows Forms Control That Takes Advantage of Visual Studio Design-Time Features
Shows how to tightly integrate a composite control into the design environment.

How to: Author Controls for Windows Forms
Provides an overview of considerations for implementing a Windows Forms control.

How to: Author Composite Controls
Shows how to create a control by inheriting from a composite control.

How to: Inherit from the UserControl Class
Provides an overview of the procedure for creating a composite control.

How to: Inherit from Existing Windows Forms Controls
Shows how to create an extended control by inheriting from the Button control class.

How to: Inherit from the Control Class
Provides an overview of creating an extended control.

How to: Align a Control to the Edges of Forms at Design Time
Shows how to use the Dock property to align your control to the edge of the form it occupies.

How to: Display a Control in the Choose Toolbox Items Dialog Box
Shows the procedure for installing your control so that it appears in the Customize Toolbox dialog box.

How to: Provide a Toolbox Bitmap for a Control
Shows how to use the ToolboxBitmapAttribute to display an icon next to your custom control in the Toolbox.

How to: Test the Run-Time Behavior of a UserControl
Shows how to use the UserControl Test Container to test the behavior of a composite control.

Design-Time Errors in the Windows Forms Designer
Explains the meaning and use of the Design-Time Error List that appears in Microsoft Visual Studio when the Windows Forms designer fails to load.

Troubleshooting Control and Component Authoring
Shows how to diagnose and fix common issues that can occur when you author a custom component or control.

Reference

Developing Custom Windows Forms Controls with the .NET Framework
Discusses how to create your own custom controls with the .NET Framework.

Language Independence and Language-Independent Components
Introduces the common language runtime, which is designed to simplify the creation and use of components. An important aspect of this simplification is enhanced interoperability between components written using different programming languages. The Common Language Specification (CLS) makes it possible to create tools and components that work with multiple programming languages.

Walkthrough: Automatically Populating the Toolbox with Custom Components
Describes how to enable your component or control to be displayed in the Customize Toolbox dialog box.