## Components

The user interface and utility elements of a Designer GUI application are called components. The Carbide.c++ UI Designer provides you with pre-written components for the standard Designer GUI, including controls, editable text, and menus. These components appear in the palette, and may be added to your UI designs by a simple select and click method (click component to select, click in design to add it to the design) or using a drag and drop operation. Using these standard components and the UI Designer will allow you to implement the display and flow of your application's screens with minimal custom code.

UI Designer fully supports the addition of your own custom components. Your properly specified custom components will appear in the palette. You may add them to UI designs and edit them with the Properties view and Events view the same as any standard component.

In C++ terms:

- a component is a class
- the individual user interface elements that you place in your UI designs are objects of the component classes.

The following topics describe the use of components and their associated objects in the UI Designer.

- Events
- Properties
- Scalable Strings
- Standard Components

##### Related tasks

- Component Tasks

##### Related references

- Component Palette