That's an impressive response from TheGreatCthulhu and ERI523 and sure to be very helpful to many other users. Maybe should have started a new thread!
Obviously the material here is going to take some digesting as there's a few features new to me but here a couple of silly questions for starters:
In TrafficLight.h what's the [Flags] there for? Seems to make no difference if I take it out but changing it to say [FlagsZ] throws C2337 which isn't a listed error. Is it important?
The demo project works as a stand-alone but the most obvious problem is that it doesn't appear to create a component (visible in designer)making it difficult to design UI. In fernando306's project for example it's necessary to leave a large blank area in designer for all the instantiated panels to be plugged in at run-time. Or am I missing a step?
Looking again at "Component Class" it certainly appears made-for-the-part with overloaded constructor ("for designer support"). I guess the reference to IContainer gives the class container properties without the neccessity of inheriting from an actual container (i.e, panel.) Maybe in the non-express versions this works in the way we want it to. I'm shooting in the dark here - hopefully managing to miss my foot! When I have learned a lot more than I know now maybe I will be able to make more informed guesses...
Thanks again,
RogerD