How do I get the WinForm Designer to totally ignore a property on a custom control?

Question

This must be a FAQ, but I can’t find a duplicate question!

There are lot of different attributes that control what the WinForm Designer does with properties on a custom control, I am never clear on the one I should use in this case.

I am looking for:

• Designer does not show property in grid
• Designer does not read value of property
• Designer does not set property to default value
• E.g. Designer behaves as if the property was not there.
• Designer does not complain if it has already done one of the above before the attributes were added (hard!)

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Background.

The code that is giving me the problem is:

this.eventListControl.FilterSets = 
   ((SystList<FilterSet>)(resources.GetObject("eventListControl.FilterSets")));

The FilterSets property should never have been touched by the winforms designer; it is now not Serializable and MsDev falls over every time a form that used the eventListControl is changed!

Answer 1

I think you can use [Browsable (false)] and [DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Hidden)]

The second attribute prevents the property from appearing in InitializeComponent