user-controlsvisual studio
i have a user control that descends from UserControl.
When dropped onto the form the user control is invisible, because it doesn't have any kind of border to show itself.
The PictureBox and Panel controls, at design time, draws a dashed 1px border to make it visible.
What is the proper way to do that? Is there an attribute you can use to make VS add that?
These files contain user preference configurations that are in general specific to your machine, so it's better not to put it in SCM. Also, VS will change it almost every time you execute it, so it will always be marked by the SCM as 'changed'. I don't include either, I'm in a project using VS for 2 years and had no problems doing that. The only minor annoyance is that the debug parameters (execution path, deployment target, etc.) are stored in one of those files (don't know which), so if you have a standard for them you won't be able to 'publish' it via SCM for other developers to have the entire development environment 'ready to use'.
You need to put your directory structure in your project directory. And then click "Show All Files" icon in the top of Solution Explorer toolbox. After that, the added directory will be shown up. You will then need to select this directory, right click, and choose "Include in Project."
Best Answer
There is no property that will do this automatically. However you can archive this by overriding the OnPaint in your control and manually drawing the rectangle.
Inside the overridden event you can call base.OnPaint(e) to draw the controls content and then add use the graphics object to paint the dotted line around the edge.
As you can see you will need to wrap this extra code in an if statement that queries the controls DesignMode property so it only draws in your IDE.