designing Panels without a parent Form in VS?

Question

Does anyone know of any tools/plugins that allow you to design a Panel independently of a Form (Windows, not Web Form) within Visual Studio?

I've been using the designer and manually extracting the bits I want from the source, but surely there is a nicer way.

Answer 1

You could just write the code by hand!

Answer 2

You could do all the design work inside of a UserControl.

If you go that route, instead of just copying the bits out of the user control, simply use the user control itself.

Answer 3

As Chris Karcher said, you should probably use a user control. This will allow easy, VS-supported/-integrated reuse without having to manually fiddle with designer code.