Hi,

I am trying to develop a component that inherit from UserControl for my
application.

My goal with that component is not to reuse it in many places through the
project, but to instanciate it dynamically when i need to show it in a form.

What happens is that i have a relatively huge form (like 10 tabs) and in
run-time and design-time loading/using the form takes for ever.

I thought it would be nice to instanciate the content of the tab whenever
the user goes to it (because it can happen that i user never goes to a tab).

I was able to create my component based on UserControl; however, i need the
ActiveControl property of the component to still give the correct result.
For instance, if i have three textboxes in my component and i query the
ActiveControl of the form i need it to tell me which box has the focus (not
to tell me that my component has the focus).

I was looking how to solve the problem, and i noticed that the ActiveControl
property cannot be overriden in my component, so i changed my component to
inherit from Control, and that works... however, i lost VS IDE functionality
to modify the looks of my component!

My question (finally) is: what VS.NET IDE needs into a class to be able to
show it in the form designer mode???

Thanks a lot, Jos? Araujo.