Visual.Inheritance.Let.Down

I'm a little disappointed with the discovery of some limitations (or should I say annoyances) when using Visual Inheritance in Visual Studio 2005 a few days ago. It appears that if you have any of the following in a base Form:

• ToolStrip
• MenuStrip
• ContextMenuStrip
• StatusStrip
• TableLayoutPanel
• FlowLayoutPanel
• DataGridView
• BindingNavigator

you will not be able to edit their properties in the Properties Window in an inherited Form. (All the properties will be greyed-out) The biggest punch came from the DataGridView, since it is the most common control to be used in applications and it is very natural for developers to create base forms that contain DataGridViews.

This limitation does not exist in Visual Studio .NET 2003 and it is very disappointing to see it in Visual Studio 2005. I read that it has something to do with the complexity of handling the control's collections in the inherited forms. Fine!!! But why disable everything?! And why the funny thing of allowing the properties to be set in code but not through the Properties Windows? This really created a lot of inconveniences.

I really hope that they will fix it soon as it will be a shame to lose such a feature in such a cool IDE.

You can read about it in these links:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=02f9cd99-08a7-4efa-92d0-99a53b91d302

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=4e5ab2bb-17ec-49f9-a48d-c19753c9ad7c

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=3b3c31c2-dd75-477e-a664-3608f27a598b