How to make dynamic user controls play nice with the designer

I have a dynamic user control that instantiates various bars and labels dynamically based on the number of members in a object group. This functionality works out very well, but the issue is that I am not the only developer on this project. I am new to the team and the "senior" members want all of the components to work in the designer. Since the components of the user control are generated at run ti开发者_StackOverflow中文版me I am not sure how to go about making some/any of them show up in design view. Is this even an option?

I don't think that's possible, because there is no markup for the designer to show. I find it hard to believe that they would expect dynamically created controls to show in the designer.

EDIT

Thinking about it some more, why don't you just add a few hard-coded instances of the control in the markup, with the ability to add/remove. That way, the control is displayed in the designer, but you can still add/remove instances. That would probably be the best compromise in this case.

Why not give both the possibility of defining the number of dynamic controls at design time, and at run time?

1. In your custom control class, you can define a property that specifies the number of controls. Implement adding/removing controls in the set{} method of this property.

2. Make your property a "designer property". See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/a19191fh.aspx

Keep in mind that the designer actually creates an instance of your class. Also, when a user changes your "property" in the designer, the set{} method is invoked.

I hope this helps