Introduction
Developing a nice custom control is just one part of the story. As a control author you should also pay attention about the experience of other developers who will be using your control. In most of the real world cases developers use Visual Studio as the IDE for developing .NET applications. You can enhance the experience of other developers using your control by providing proper designer support. For example, you can control how your control properties and events are displayed in property window and toolbox. A set of attributes often called as Design Time Attributes allow you to accomplish this.
Common Design Time Attributes
The following sections explain the common design time attributes that allow you to change how the control behaves in the property window and toolbox. Most of these attributes reside in System.ComponentModel namespace. In the following sections we use the GraphicButton control that we created earlier in this series.
Deciding whether a property will be visible in the property window
By default all the public properties of a custom control are displayed in the property window. Sometimes you may want that developers should set a property only via code and not via property window. The [Browsable] attribute allows you to control just that. The usage of this attribute is as follows:
[Browsable(false)]public string ImageUrl
{get { return ViewState["imgurl"] as string; }set { ViewState["imgurl"] = value; }}
The value of false indicates that the ImageUrl property will not be displayed in the property window.