Windows Forms Programming in C#

Visual Inheritance

After all the settings and behavior and layout details you've learned to pack into forms in this chapter, you may decide that you'd like to keep some of your hard work in a Form-derived base class for easy reuse by further derivations, and you can certainly do that. If you follow the convention that forms initialize their own properties and the properties of their child controls in a function called InitializeComponent, the Designer provides direct support for your visual inheritance: the reuse of a form base class via inheritance.

Table 2.1. Parent Menu Merge Settings

Parent MenuItem	MergeType	MergeOrder
File	MergeItems	0
File | New Child	Add	0
File | Exit	Add	2
Window	Add	2

Table 2.2. Child Menu Merge Settings

Child MenuItem	MergeType	MergeOrder ...