Visual Studio Designers

Designers are much more visual in nature than the text editors within Visual Studio; they provide a graphical perspective of a particular solution artifact. Thus, a form appears within a designer just as it would to the end user, as visual constructs made up of buttons, borders, menus, and frames. The code to implement the items shown in a designer is actually written by Visual Studio.

Like the various editors, the designers are similar in form and function. They occupy space within the tabbed documents area of the IDE (just as the editors do). They might take on different behaviors depending on their target use. The Windows Forms Designer and the component designer appear nearly the same, but there are subtle differences in their uses.