I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I post here since using WAP is the only way I found to do this. I don't understand why you can't set the visibility of the controls in WebForms, it should work like WinForms. So, to the point...

For example, imagine we have a MasterPage, we have TextBox in it. We want to change the TextBox's text property from within a contentpage depending x or y, why should we waste time using FindControl?, creating additional methods or properties to handle this etc?, this is lame; it just doesn't make sense. Fortunately, with WAP, we can change the .designer.cs/vb file and change the modifier from protected to public, and we have strongly-typed access to the controls we need, it works like a charm, so easy...

It would be nice if we could just change the modifier using the properties windows (like in WindowsForms), or maybe using the context menu in design view or something.

Any idea if this can be implemented in WAP or via addin?

We unfortunately won't be able to easily implement this in WAP this month (I don't think there is any easy way to modify the property grid like this), but it is something we can put on the list to look at in the future. 

As you say, you can always go to the .designer.cs/.vb file and modify the accessor directly.  This was something we added support for in WAP especially for to enable the scenario you outlined above.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Thanks for the short (and honest) reply Scott, any idea if this is equally hard to (maybe) add a context menu item to the control in design view to change the accessor?

My sense is that might be possible via an add-in -- although it is slightly tricky.  The .designer.cs file is only persisted on change events and/or view-switches, and so I'm not sure there are meta-data hooks exposed that allow you to modify the accessor mid-edit. 

My guess is that an add-in could open and save the .designer file as part of this context menu action, although we'd probably need to try it out to confirm for sure.

Hope this helps,

Scott