Winforms DataBind to Control's Visible Property
I've found that life is better if you assume that binding to a control's Visible property is broken, despite the fact that it sometimes works. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327305, which says as much (and while the KB article applies to .NET 1.0 and 1.1, it still seems to be a problem in at least 2.0).
I created a utility class for creating bindings which, among other things, gave me a centralized place to add a work-around. Instead of actually creating a binding on Visible it does two things:
- It subscribes to the data source's INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged event and sets the Visible value as appropriate when the event is raised.
- It sets the initial value of Visible according to the current data source value.
This required a little reflection code, but wasn't too bad. It is critical that you don't bind the Visible property and do the work-around or it won't work.
Workaround: Set the Visible property on the BindingComplete event.
I had same issue setting a label's Visible property - always stays false, even though setting the Enabled property works fine.
I just hit this issue in .NET 4.7.1 and Visual Studio 2017. To fix it, I changed the Visible property on my control to be initially set to True, as I had it as False previously.