Custom Controls

The ability to create custom controls has always been a popular feature to Windows application developers. This section provides links to articles and other resources related to extending existing .NET controls and building your own completely custom controls.

Developing Custom Windows Forms Controls
Provides an overview of associated sample articles illustrating the basic concepts of Microsoft Windows control development through both discussion and code snippets.

Developing Compelling User Controls that Target Windows Forms
Read the first of a two-part series that introduces Windows Forms, beginning with their inheritance from one of the .NET CLR base classes, which makes control creation much faster than before. Later, control programming is illustrated through the development of a login control.

Debugging Windows Forms Controls
Learn to debug your user controls by creating a host application for them to run in, step through your code, and set breakpoints.

Cutting Edge: Customize Your Open File Dialog
Displaying an Open File dialog is certainly easy in the Microsoft® .NET Framework with Windows® Forms, but the resulting window is not as customizable as when you create it through the Win32® API. With Windows 2000, Microsoft added a nice feature—the places bar, which is the vertical toolbar that appears on the left side of the window to let you select a frequently visited folder.

Debugging Design-Time Controls
Debug your custom design-time control when it is being used with the Visual Studio .NET Designer.

Creating Visual Basic .NET Controls from Scratch
Billy Hollis shows you how to build a visual control from scratch that renders its own interface.

Creating a Data Bound ListView Control
Rocky Lhotka discusses using inheritance to create a custom data bound ListView control, as well as showing you how to create a data bound control and how to use Reflection to find interesting information about the data source.

Validator Controls for Windows Forms
Billy Hollis shows how to build a single Windows Forms control that wraps up most of the capabilities of the full set of ASP.NET validators.

Writing Custom Designers for .NET Components
See the features available to create custom designers, how to associate features with components, and how to use features to create great design-time user interfaces.

.NET Licensing
Gives detailed information about the licensing scheme built into the .NET Framework, and drills into different licensing schemes available and how to implement some of these schemes with the .NET Framework.