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WinForms : DesignMode

Back to WinForms...It was a user control which calls a service, I knew that if I wrap the service call inside a ComponentModel.DesignMode, I could get away with the service call being called at design time and the designer throwing me exceptions...Now this is not an issue at all when your are designing the control, cos' Visual Studio does not create an instance of the user control that is being designed, instead it creates a base class, UserControl, this is also true when you designing a form, a Form instance is created. Therefore .ctor of the control being designed is never called, so doesn't the service call.Now if I drag an drop this control (ctrl1) into another a control(ctrl2), the control's DesignMode property is true, but if I now drag the ctrl1 into a form, the DesignMode of ctrl1 is false.This basically means that ctrl2 is sited in the form and not ctrl1, makes sense right?.There are two work around that you can use to avoide this...1) See if the current process that is hosting the form is devenv, This is not a flexible solution, as this will not work if you open your view in a different environment.2) Use the LicenceManager class to see if we are in DesingMode or runtime.

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