Breathe New Life into Old Controls with ExtenderProviders

rom the beginning, the Tag property has been a Visual Basic programming staple. Any time you want to attach a little extra bit of information, you can put it in the Tag property. In .NET, the Tag property became even more useful, allowing you to store objects rather than just strings.

While Tag is great, there are times when it's just not quite enough. What if you're working on a large project and some other developer needs to use the same Tag property for something else? You could store a collection in the Tag property where you can both put values but that requires extra coordination. Or you could subclass the control to add an extra property to it, but that would give you a whole new class to debug and maintain. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just add an extra Tag property to a control for your own private use?