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Creating Components
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A component can be almost any program element that you want to manipulate at design time. Creating a component means deriving a new class from an existing one. You can derive a new component in several ways:

- Modifying existing controls
- Creating windowed controls
- Creating graphic controls
- Subclassing Windows controls
- Creating nonvisual components

The following table summarizes the different kinds of components and the classes you use as starting points for each.

Component creation starting points

To do this | Start with this type
Modify an existing component | Any existing component, such as TButton or TListBox, or an abstract component type, such as TCustomListBox
Create a windowed control | TWinControl
Create a graphic control | TGraphicControl
Subclassing a control | Any Windows control
Create a nonvisual component | TComponent

You can also derive classes that are not components and cannot be manipulated on a form, such as TRegIniFile and TFont.

See Also

The Visual Component Library

Components and Classes

What Goes into a Component

Creating a New Component

Testing Uninstalled Components

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