Abstract
Creating your own controls is a great way to augment your UI development. There's more to creating user controls however than dropping a few constituent controls on a designer and crafting a few properties or methods. This session illustrates the techniques you need to elevate your user controls to the next level. Since other developers use your control, you need a firm grasp on how to make your control interact with the Visual Studio Forms designer. Learn how to decorate your control with design time adornments (example: Visio-style shape spinners). We'll look at several powerful tools - Property Browser integration, Extender Property Providers, Type Converters, Designer Verbs, Custom Designers and UI Type Editors - that make your control easy to use, work effectively in the Visual Studio IDE and also look professional. Bonus tip #1: Add data-binding to your control. Bonus tip #2: Learn how to debug your control effectively.
What it's about
When I create a Usercontrol for a .Net Windows Forms application I need to consider two different audiences. First is the end user. When I think about the person who will be opening the form and interacting with my control the most important consideration is how my control looks and works.
The second person to consider is the developer who places my control on their form. Quite often this is the same person creating the control, me. But not always. If you sell a package of controls or create reusable controls for your team then another set of eyes and hands will be working with your control.
The developer needs to have a control that is easy to use, easy to understand and helpful in every part of the development process.
This talks addresses all the design-time, IDE tools that you can add to your control.