Design-Time Behavior

Currently, Visual Studio .NET offers significantly different design-time capabilities for custom controls and user controls.

Visual Studio .NET supports a wide range of RAD design-time capabilities for a custom control. Design-time behavior can range from simple customization of design-time display to enhanced property editing in the property grid to template editing and data binding. Custom controls can also be assigned a customized icon and can be placed on the toolbox of the design-time environment. In addition, custom controls can be associated with custom designers that provide the same RAD experience on a design surface as the standard set of ASP.NET controls. We will describe these custom designers in Chapter 15, "Design-Time Functionality."

User controls have minimal design-time support in the current version of Visual Studio .NET. The design surface provides all user controls with a simple default design-time appearance similar to that of a placeholder block. A user control does not offer its properties in the property grid and cannot be placed on the toolbox.