How to prevent winforms designer from setting Text property to instance name

Question

Before I begin, it seems a similar/same question might have been asked before here, however no definitive answer exists.

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Suppose I have a custom winforms control which overrides the Text property:

public class MyControl : Control
{
    [DefaultValue("")]
    public override string Text
    {
        get { return base.Text; }
        set 
        {
            base.Text = value;
            ...
        }
    }

    public MyControl()
    {
        this.Text = "";
    }
}

My question is, How do I prevent the designer from automatically assigning the Text property?

When instances of MyControl are created, the designer automatically assigns the Text property to the name of the control instance, e.g., "MyControl1", "MyControl2", etc. Ideally, I would like the text property to be set to its default, an empty string.

Answer 1

The designer sets Text property of control in InitializeNewComponent of ControlDesigner.
You can create a new designer for your control and override that method and after calling base method, set the Text property to empty string.

This way your control starts with an empty Text property and also you can change the value of Text using property grid at design-time.

using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Windows.Forms.Design;

[Designer(typeof(MyControlDesigner))]
public partial class MyControl: Control
{
}

public class MyControlDesigner : ControlDesigner
{
    public override void InitializeNewComponent(System.Collections.IDictionary defaultValues)
    {
        base.InitializeNewComponent(defaultValues);

        PropertyDescriptor descriptor = TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(base.Component)["Text"];
        if (((descriptor != null) && (descriptor.PropertyType == typeof(string))) && (!descriptor.IsReadOnly && descriptor.IsBrowsable))
        {
            descriptor.SetValue(base.Component, string.Empty);
        }
    }
}