What's the state of play with "Visual Inheritance"

Question

We have an application that has to be flexible in how it displays it's main form to the user - depending on the user, the form should be slightly different, maybe an extra button here or there, or some other nuance. In order to stop writing code to explicitly remove or add controls etc, I turned to visual inheritance to solve the problem - in what I thought was a neat, clean and logical OO style - turns out that half the time inherited forms have a hard time rendering themeselves in VS for no good reason etc - and I get the feeling that developers and to some extent Microsoft have shunned the practice of Visual Inheritance - can you confirm this, am I missing something here?

Regards.

Answer 1

I thought they had more or less sorted the desktop designer issues in 2005. Have you tried the usual culprits?

• No abstract control types
• No constructor arguments in any form
• Initialisation moved to Form_Load as opposed to the Ctor
• No controls in the same project as the usercontrol/form that they are put inside
• Close all documents -> Clean -> Rebuild
• Restart VS

I seemed to think that as long as you did all of the above it worked..... mostly.