Control's Enabled appearance at design time? - vb.net

Question

I defined a custom button class, which sets background color when button is enabled/disabled.
Enabled appearance at runtime (A):
Disabled appearance at runtime (B):
Design time appearance is always (A), regardless of the value of Enabled property.
I would like my control to appear in designer exactly the way it would appear at run time. Is it possible and, if so, how can do it?
Here is what I tried (only relevant parts of the code):
Public Class StyledButton : Inherits Button
Private p_fEnabled As Boolean
<DefaultValue(True)>
Public Shadows Property Enabled As Boolean
Get
Return p_fEnabled
End Get
Set(value As Boolean)
p_fEnabled = value
MyBase.Enabled = value
UpdateVisualStyle()
End Set
End Property
Private Sub UpdateVisualStyle()
If Me.Enabled Then
'set enabled appearance
Else
'set disabled appearance
End If
End Sub
End Class

Answer 1

I'll explain why it behaves this way. A control behaves a lot at design time as it does at runtime. It provides the strong WYSIWYG support in the Winforms designer. But certain properties are very awkward at design time, you would not actually want the Visible property to take effect for example. Pretty important that the control remains visible even though you set Visible to False in the Properties Window.
This is a core role of the designer for a control. It intercepts these kind of difficult properties and emulates them. Showing the intended value in the property grid but not actually passing them on to the control's property setter.
The Enabled property fits this category. If it weren't intercepted then the control couldn't be selected anymore. Other ones are ContextMenu, AllowDrop, Location for UserControl and Form, etcetera. Your Shadows replacement doesn't fool the designer, it uses Reflection to find properties by name. So your property doesn't have any effect, your property setter simply never gets called.
You can only truly get this by overriding OnPaint() for the control so you can display a different color at design time. And a custom designer to poke it. A significant hang-up however is that it isn't simple to replace the renderer for the button, the one that implements the OnPaint() method. Microsoft decided to make the renderers internal, you can't override them.
Way too much trouble, I recommend you pass this up.

Answer 2

The shadowed property does work as designed at runtime, just not in the IDE. You would not want to loose controls which are Visible = False, and you would want to drill into Button events even when Enabled = False. Since the IDE has no intention of drawing a disabled control, there is no reason for it to invoke Invalidate when you change the property.
Since it works at runtime, trick it in the designer to use another property which looks like the original:
<Browsable(False), DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never),
EditorBrowsable(False)>
Public Shadows Property Enabled As Boolean
Get
Return neoEnabled
End Get
Set(value As Boolean)
neoEnabled = value
End Set
End Property
A new property, with the right name for the IDE.
<DisplayName("Enabled")>
Public Property neoEnabled As Boolean
Get
Return p_fEnabled
End Get
Set(value As Boolean)
p_fEnabled = value
UpdateVisualStyle()
MyBase.Enabled = p_fEnabled
End Set
End Property
Sadly, both Enabled and neoEnabled will be offered by Intellisense in code, but since they both do the same thing, its not a big deal. test code:
Private Sub UpdateVisualStyle()
If p_fEnabled Then
' other interesting stuff
MyBase.BackColor = Color.Lime
Else
MyBase.BackColor = Color.LightGray
End If
MyBase.Invalidate()
End Sub
You have probably wrestled with it more that I, and come up with a cleaner implementation.
This persists the BackColor associated with neoEnabled state:
'
'StyledButton1
'
Me.StyledButton1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.LightGray
Me.StyledButton1.Enabled = False
Me.StyledButton1.neoEnabled = False
versus
Me.StyledButton1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Lime
Me.StyledButton1.Enabled = False
Me.StyledButton1.neoEnabled = True