John,

>Perhaps it is better to group "thou shalt not mess with me" baseclasses in a monolithic file to make it less visible/accessible/tempting. ;-) It does mean everything gets included if you use a single baseclass which was one of the downsides of the vcx in VFP.<

I hope this doesn't sound nasty or anything (maybe just frustrated), but I think all you guys are missing my point about the base WinForm controls classes. There is one project (one .DLL) that contains all of my base classes that are used application-wide, call it MyCompany.WinUI.MyBaseClasses. The project contains other files besides just the one that I've been talking about previously (Controls.cs ... which contains all the base classes ... MyTextBox, MyComboBox, MyButton, etc.). We also have some specialized ComboBoxes. They have their own separate file, Combos.cs ... they are sub-classed from our base MyComboBox class. We have several different kinds of base Form classes. This is all stuff that will always be used in any application we write and it's all in the one MyBaseClasses project.

So, what would be the benefit of having separate files for MyTextBox.cs, MyComboBox.cs, MyButton.cs, etc.? These files would all still be in the MyBaseClasses project. You use the project, you include them all, there's no way around that. You certainly aren't advocating separate projects for each kind of control, are you?

Even if that wasn't the case ... I can't believe that you would have one Form with nothing on it but TextBoxes. <g>

~~Bonnie