I remember the time I left a box of floppies, with data, in the back of my car on a hot day. It melted the disk jackets, but the magnetic media was ok. I spent hours cutting the disk jackets open and moving the discs into good jackets and copying them. Those were the days when I worked for a living.

... and talk with a squeaky voice.

My co-worker likes the noise. I don't. I sit as far away from the help desk cacophony as possible. I use headphones a lot. Mostly classical and jazz. Much more productive this way, but then, some days I don't need to be.

It wasn't quite that straightforward, but that was essentially the problem. Some of the controls were inherited from that base control and there was code in the OnLoad event to initialize the collection. I surrounded that code with

if (!DesignMode)
{
}

That took care of it. Thanks for your help.

The default constructor creates a new list. So you're saying if I move that code to another method and leave the default constructor blank, that should take care of it? I'll try that.

I have a custom control in C# and one of the properties is an internal class that consists of a list of another class. The control and the class work fine, except that every time I touch a form on which the control exists, it adds extraneous lines to the designer code. Here's the property in the control. The DefaultValue is null, so my assumption is that it should not create anything in the designer code:

private PopupTable gridColumns = null;
\[Category("Appearance"), Description("Collection of Columns to show in grid"), 
        DesignerSerializationVisibility( DesignerSerializationVisibility.Visible),     DefaultValue(null)\]
public PopupTable GridColumns
{
    get { return gridColumns; }
    set 
    {
        if (value != null) gridColumns = value;
    }
 }

Here's what it inserts into the designer code in a VB form:

New fctgControls2.PopupTable.Add(PopupColumn1)
New fctgControls2.PopupTable.Add(PopupColumn2)
New fctgControls2.PopupTable.Add(PopupColumn3)
New fctgControls2.PopupTable.Add(PopupColumn4)

So, every time I touch a form, I have to go in and remove this junk from the designer code. After that, the app works fine. Any ideas?