What are the component containers that ship with the Windows Server Family?

Answer 1

System.Web.UI.Page, System.Windows.Forms.Form and System.ComponentModel.Container

The essence of component development is not to build what you can buy. Buy a rich text web control from the market for $99 instead of design and implement one from scratch. Snapping together pre-tested components are faster, cheaper and probably more reliable than coding everything for yourself.

What is a '.NET component'? Arguably, almost any .NET class file is a component, in that it can easily be compiled to a DLL, it benefits from .NET versioning, and it can be reused. If you narrow the definition to components that are 'designable', in other words you can drop instances onto a Visual Studio .NET design surface and set their properties or create event handlers visually, then you need a class that directly or indirectly implements IComponent. Designable objects do not necessarily have a user interface. Those that do are controls as well as components, and inherit from System.Windows.Forms.Control or System.Web.UI.Control.

The existence of components also implies the existence of containers, which again may be visual or non-visual. In the .NET Framework both ASP.NET Web Forms and rich client Windows Forms are visual component containers. The container plays an important role in component management. In particular, all containers implement IDisposable, which means they have a Dispose method for releasing unmanaged resources such as window handles or open files. In their Dispose method, containers must also call Dispose on all the components they host.