Components represented the biggest shift in the object-oriented paradigm and made rapid application development tools powerful and possible. More than likely, whole books will be written on this subject alone.
In this chapter you learned that the same techniques you use for implementing any class can be used to implement custom controls. Generalize the UserControl for simplified control creation, and generalize a specific control to extend the behavior of an existing control without reproducing available code.
Visual Studio .NET makes incorporating components a straightforward process. Compile a class library assembly and use the Customize Toolbox dialog box to add your custom controls to the toolbox.
Inheritance means that you are likely to find more custom, third-party components than ever before because building components in Visual Basic .NET is easier than ever before.