This article—Design-Time Integration of Windows Forms Components—is from Windows Forms Programming in C#, by Chris Sells. Copyright © 2004 Chris Sells. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.

Design-Time Integration

A component is a nonvisual class designed specifically to integrate with a design-time environment such as Visual Studio .NET. WinForms provides several standard components, and .NET lets you build your own, gaining a great deal of design-time integration with very little work.

On the other hand, with a bit more effort, you can integrate nonvisual components and controls very tightly into the design-time environment, providing a rich development experience for the programmer using your custom components and controls.