Name property of UserControl or Control

Question

What is special about the Name property of a Control or UserControl that causes it to be displayed as "(Name)" inside the property grid within Visual Studio?

Answer 1

Check out this article about design-time attributes in .NET. Specifically, I think you are looking for the Browsable attribute, which enables properties in Visual Studio's design-time properties dialogue.

If you have a property called Name, you'd declare it like this:

[Browsable(true)]
public string Name { /*...*/ }

You can set a lot more attributes, like Description, DefaultValue and Category, which will come in handy if you're planning on presenting your controls to other developers.

EDIT: To get the effect that you want, use both the Browsable and ParenthesizePropertyName attributes:

[Browsable(true)]
[ParenthesizePropertyName(true)]
public string Name { /*...*/ }

(Thanks to Ksempac from the comments for this.)

Since you didn't specify if you're using VB or C#, here's the same thing in VB:

<Browsable(true)> _
<ParenthesizePropertyName(true)> _
Public Property Name(Value As String) As String
' ...
End Property

EDIT 2:

I think you're wondering about why you would want to surround your property with parentheses in the first place, or perhaps what it means for a property's name to have parentheses around it.

You can find the answer to that here:

Parenthesized properties are shown at the top of the window — or at the top of their category if the list is grouped by category

Basically, if a property is important, you want it to appear at the top of a sorted list, so you surround it with parentheses to indicate this.