One of the biggest selling points of Microsoft® Visual Basic® has always been its support for components, allowing third parties to develop visual controls (and eventually, non-visual components) that provided new functionality to the Visual Basic developer. This aspect of Visual Basic development led to the availability of a huge number of controls—both shareware/freeware and from third-party development shops. Eventually, new visual and non-visual components could even be developed directly in Visual Basic, allowing for the development of an even larger number of controls, many of which where created by programmers (and programming teams) for their own use.

In the world of .NET development, the need for custom UI components is still present, but the mechanisms for creating these components have changed. In this article, I will discuss why you would want to create Microsoft Windows® controls, how control development has changed from Visual Basic 5.0 and version 6.0, and I will introduce four samples (each covered in its own article) of control development.