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Design-Time Support for Web Forms

This section contains topics that describe how to implement designers for ASP.NET server controls. For background information about designer classes, see Custom Designers.

Terminology Note   The terms Web Forms page and ASP.NET page are used interchangeably. The term Web Forms is generally applied to the design-time technology that enables the authoring of ASP.NET pages in a visual designer. The term Web server control refers to a class in the System.Web.UI.WebControls namespace.

ASP.NET provides the following base designer classes in the System.Web.UI.Design namespace:

Designer classes for the Web server controls derive directly or indirectly from these base classes and are in the System.Web.UI.Design.WebControls namespace. For example, System.Web.UI.Design.WebControls.ButtonDesigner is the designer for the System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button control, System.Web.UI.Design.WebControls.CalendarDesigner is the designer for the System.Web.UI.WebControls.Calendar control, and so on.

Note   The following notes do not pertain to designer classes, but they are included here because they apply to overall design-time functionality in Web Forms:

  • The Web Forms designer does not support the ShouldSerializePropertyName and ResetPropertyName methods that are optionally exposed by Windows Forms controls for property persistence. Server controls are serialized using methods provided by the ControlPersister class. The implementation of these methods is driven by metadata attributes such as DefaultValueAttribute, PersistenceModeAttribute, and DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.
  • If a control exposes properties that have subproperties (that is, properties whose types are classes that in turn expose properties), apply the NotifyParentPropertyAttribute to the subproperties if you want the parent property to receive notification of changes to the values of a subproperty.

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