The Moth

One of the features that devs got excited with when Visual Studio .NET 2002 launched, is Visual Form Inheritance. I have never used this feature in a commercial app but I guess I can see its appeal.

.NET Compact Framework v1.0 projects do not support Visual Form Inheritance in the designer (you cannot view the results of inheriting your form from another of your own forms). Specifically, if you attempt to directly inherit from anything other than System.Windows.Form, the winforms designer will not render your form's design surface. However, your application will still compile and execute with the visual inheritance correctly observed at run time.

With Visual Studio .NET 2003, you should do your design work before changing the parent of your form to be another form (i.e. do it while it still inherits from Form and the designer works). When you need the designer again, change your class to inherit from System.Windows.Forms.Form

public class Form4 
    //: System.Windows.Forms.Form  // Use this line for design time
    : Form2      // Use this line for runtime

This has been discussed multiple time previously in the newsgroup archives e.g. here

So what is the story with v2.0 of the compact framework and Visual Studio 2005?

Start with a new Device Application with a single form and add some controls to it. If you navigate to "Project->Add New Item", the dialog does not include the "Inherited Form" template (in Beta 2). However, you can add a "Windows Form" and then change the code to achieve visual form inheritance. Here are the steps:

1. Create a new Smart Device Project
2. To the default Form1, add a button
3. Add a new form (Form2)
4. Delete the mainmenu from Form2
5. Go to the code and change it (Form2.cs) so it does not inherit from Form and instead inherits from Form1
6. Rebuild the solution
7. Open Form2 in the designer and observe how it shows button1

If you are using VB, make sure at step 5 you go to the Form2.Designer.vb (instead of the Form2.vb) - see my previous post on partial classes and how to get to the designer file.

Hopefully by RTM the VSD team will add the template so it will be even easier!

UPDATE: September 2005 - Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate supports the "Inherited Form" template