Disable designer in Visual Studio?

visual-studio windows-forms-designer
I. J. Kennedy picture I. J. Kennedy · Feb 19, 2009 · Viewed 15.6k times · Source

I'm using Visual C# Express to write Windows Form applications, and call me old school, but I don't like the designer. It is a nuisance and pollutes my project with lots of unwanted files, as well as unwanted monkey-generated source code.

Please tell me there's a way to turn it off completely.

Answer

Andrew picture Andrew · Mar 2, 2009

Add a [System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategory("")] attribute before a UI class to avoid designer activation on double-click.

Note that including System.ComponentModel at the top of the file and then just adding the attribute as [DesignerCategory("")] will not work (at least not in Visual Studio 2010/2013). You must use the full, namespace-qualified attribute type name.

Related questions

Zooming in the visual studio form designer

I'm using the Visual Studio 2013 form designer to edit a form. The size of the form in the designer window is too big so I want to zoom out. In applications like Photoshop or Blend I could (among other things) …

Read More
Windows Form Designer: Could not load file or assembly

Has anyone ever had the issue where trying to "View Designer" on a windows form in Visual Studio .NET causes the error: "Could not load file or assembly…" ? In this case, the assembly in question was XYZ.dll. I managed …

Read More
Visual studio 2019 windows forms designer

I'm having a problem with the windows form application . When I create the windows form application , it displays the source code for the form but not the designer layout

Read More