Mike,

You can call the methods of items in the designer from a builder without an error happening. But, it won't do any good though because the code won't execute. I'm pretty sure this was designed this way because in general too much of the code inside depends on environmental things that just aren't in place at design time. Things like tables the controls are bound to not being open etc.

If your Control class works well why do you need to see it's internals change at design time anyway? Set the properties at the Control level and let it sort it all out at runtime.

I have a similar class although it's container based. It's a thermometer class, that internally has a couple of status labels, the Windows thermometer ActiveX and a shape to make it look pretty. The class is designed to be dropped onto a form, and horizontally adjusted to how wide the display needs to be. The internal objects all adjust their sizes at Init() time to fit to the Container. It doesn't look pretty at design time, but I only have to adjust 1 property and the class takes care of everything else. Perhaps this approach might help you in you current dilema.

>I realize that is how a Control control works. What I was hoping for was that there'd be a way to see the results at design time when I set the custom caption property. Something like a "hook" or "builder" could do it (not sure that I used the correct terms here) ?