User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls

By Matthew Macdonald

Custom controls are a key theme in .NET development. They can help your programming style by improving encapsulation, simplifying a programming model, and making user interface more “pluggable” (i.e., making it easier to swap out one control and replace it with a completely different one without rewriting your form code). Of course, custom controls can have other benefits, including the ability to transform a generic window into a state-of-the-art modern interface. Generally, developers tackle custom control development for one of three reasons:

• To create controls that abstract away unimportant details and are tailored for a specific type of data. You saw this model in Chapter 6 with custom ListView and TreeView examples.
• To create controls that provide entirely new functionality, or just combine existing UI elements in a unique way. An example of this is the directory browser control developed in this chapter.
• To create controls with a distinct original look, or ones that mimic popular controls in professional applications (like Microsoft’s Outlook bar) that aren’t available to the masses. This topic is considered briefly in this chapter, and returned to in Chapter 13, with GDI+.

Creating custom controls in .NET is far easier than it has been in languages like C++ or VB, where you typically need to embrace the ActiveX model to create a truly shareable component. As most developers have found, ActiveX controls can be difficult to distribute because every version needs to be registered. Creating ActiveX controls also requires a bit of wizardry, with special care taken to handle property pages, design-time versus runtime appearance, and state management.

In .NET, creating a custom control is as easy as creating an ordinary class. You simply inherit from the best possible ancestor and add the specific features you need. Best of all, you can create a custom control class as part of an existing project, and then decide later to place it in a separate assembly that can be shared with other programmers.

This chapter introduces the different types of custom controls, and the types of problems they can solve. You will look at several key examples, including a thumbnail image viewer and a masked text box, and consider advanced techniques like creating multithreaded controls. However, you won’t learn how to make these controls behave happily in Visual Studio .NET. That topic, as well other issues like control distribution and licensing, are picked up in the next chapter.

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