With regard to an IDE, what is a property editor?

Question

Just a quick question: When talking in terms of an IDE, what is a property editor?

Answer 1

You're probably hearing about the Properties Window in Visual Studio that allows you to change the properties exposed by a control at Design Time.

It looks something like this (at least, if you're kickin it old school), but generally you'll find it implemented as a grid-based window in all IDEs:

   

Otherwise, you're probably talking about a custom class that inherits from UITypeEditor and allows you to add design-time support to a custom control that you've created. It works in conjunction with the Properties Window shown above to add additional functionality that is relevant to the specific needs of your custom control. This is discussed in detail in this CodeProject article.