How to get the "real" value of the Visible property?

Question

If you set the Visible property of a Windows Forms control to true, that property still returns false if any of the control's parent windows are hidden. Is there a way to get the true, underlying visibility flag of the control in case the parent window is hidden?

Answer 1

Well, the regular implementation does check up the control stack, to ensure that all parents are visible. The only way I know to dodge this is to cheat with reflection, and ask for GetState(2), but that is brittle:

    // dodgy; not recommended
    Panel query;
    Form form = new Form
    {
        Controls = {
            new Panel {
                Visible = false,
                Controls = {
                    (query = new Panel {Visible = true})
                }
            }
        }
    };
    form.Show();

    // this is the dodgy bit...
    bool visible = (bool)typeof(Control)
        .GetMethod("GetState", BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic)
        .Invoke(query, new object[] { 2 });