Programming the Design-Time Experience

Visual Studio applies the most basic design-time experience to a custom control with no additional work. If your library contains any Platform Invocation Services (PInvoke) code, Visual Studio works on the assumption that your control may not be compatible with the host Windows operating system, and it simply draws a sizable box with the name of the control as a placeholder. The control is visible in the Toolbox only in other projects in the same solution.

To customize the design-time experience, you must add a number of attributes to describe the designer behavior. When you create controls for smart device projects, these attributes are not applied to the code directly but rather are applied by using a special ...

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