Making your components available at design time requires several steps:

• Registering components
• Providing Help for your component
• Adding property editors
• Adding component editors
• Compiling components into packages

Not all these steps apply to every component. For example, if you don't define any new properties or events, you don't need to provide Help for them. The only steps that are always necessary are registration and compilation. 

Once your components have been registered and compiled into packages, they can be distributed to other developers and installed in the IDE. For information on installing packages in the IDE, see Installing component packages.