Advanced Design-Time Support

Abstract

In Chapter 13 you explored how you could add a respectable level of design-time support to your control. You saw how attributes, type converters, and type editors could improve the Properties-window support for your control and ensure proper code serialization. In this chapter, you’ll continue to add to your design-time skills by considering a few more topics.

• Control designers. Control designers allow you to manage the design-time behavior and the design-time interface (properties and events) exposed by your control. Although control designers are quite complex pieces of the Windows Forms infrastructure (and creating one from scratch is far beyond the scope of this book), it’s not difficult to customize an existing control designer to add new features.

• Smart tags. The new .NET 2.0 controls provide them, so why can’t your controls? As you’ll see, it’s quite easy.

• Collection controls. You’ve already learned the basics about type converters and type editors. In this section, you’ll learn how to apply these to more complex controls that model collections of items, and add some extra features with a control designer.

• Licensing. If you want to restrict how your control can be used (either at runtime or at design time), you’ll need to implement some sort of licensing policy.