Hide WPF elements in Visual Studio designer

Question

I have a WPF form which basically looks like this:

<Window ...>
  <Grid>
    <DockPanel>
      [content shown during normal operation]
    </DockPanel>

    <Grid Background="#CCCC" Visibility="Hidden">
      [overlay grid which is only shown during special circumstances]
    </Grid>
  </Grid>
</Window>

The overlay grid hides everything else (i.e. the "normal content") and is only shown under special circumstances (i.e. if the network connection goes down). This works perfectly fine when running the program.

Now, in design mode, the problem is that Visual Studio ignores the Visibility="Hidden". Usually, this makes perfect sense (after all, I want to be able to edit the hidden UI elements), but in my case it's annoying, because it prevents me from editing the stuff in the DockPanel in the designer.

So, what I'd like to do is something like that:

<Grid Background="#CCCC" Visibility="Hidden" VS.ShowInDesigner="False">
  [overlay grid which is only shown during special circumstances]
</Grid>

But, alas, there is no such property, or at least none that I know of. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Starting from VS2012 you can just use the Blend namespace IsHidden attribute:

• add if not already present xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
• put d:IsHidden="true" on element you want to hide at design time only