Chapter 9. Design-Time Integration

A component is a nonvisual class designed specifically to integrate with a design-time environment such as Visual Studio .NET (VS.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.