Introduction

Visual C# .NET provides a rich collection of components that you can use to quickly create user interfaces and functionality for your Windows applications. For more advanced or customized functionality, you can create your own custom components or purchase them from a component vendor. Custom-created components encapsulate user interface and programming logic that you can directly plug in to your application.

The .NET Framework allows you to create components in several different ways:

• You can create a non-visual component by deriving from the Component class.

• You can create a control by painting its own user interface by deriving from the Control class, or any of its derived classes.

• You can create a user control (also known as a composite control) based on other existing controls by deriving from the UserControl class or any of its derived classes.

Visual C# .NET helps you extend the functionality of a user interface by allowing you to create new controls by inheriting from existing Windows controls. This technique is called visual inheritance.

The components you create cannot run by themselves; they need to be hosted in a container. The preferred place to host Windows controls is in a Windows form, although you can also host controls inside Microsoft Internet Explorer.

.NET Framework assemblies are the basic units for reuse, versioning, security, and deployment for components that are created by using the .NET Framework. An assembly is a collection of types and resources that together form a logical unit of functionality. There are different types of assemblies of which you should be aware: single-file and multifile assemblies, private and shared assemblies, static and dynamic assemblies, and satellite and resource-only assemblies.

In this chapter I show you how to create and manage components, events, and assemblies in .NET applications.