Custom Control does not resize in Visual Studio designer

I was working on a small ASP.Net control that inherited from Button, so nothing special. I went into Visual Studio in design mode and I noticed that the control did not display any resize handles so I could only move the control, not resize it using the mouse.

After intensive Googling, trying custom ControlDesigner classes with AllowResize set to true and all other kinds of strange things, I realised that in the Render method I would write a style tag while in DesignMode before rendering the button. The method was described in a previous blog entry to fix the problem with CSS files with WebResource entries inside and PerformSubstitution.

It appears that Visual Studio, by default, only resizes the controls that render an HTML element that has size. A style tag does not! The solution was to add a div around the control (and the style block) while in DesignMode. The only problem was that the div is a block element, while the input of type button is an inline element. That means that two div elements would place themselves one under the other, not next to the other like two buttons would. So I fixed the problem by also adding a float style attribute and setting it to left.

Here is a small code sample:

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
if (DesignMode)
{
  writer.AddStyleAttribute("float", "left");
  writer.RenderBeginTag("div");
  // this renders an embedded CSS file as a style block
  writer.Write(this.RenderDesignTimeCss("MyButton.css"));
}
base.Render(writer);
if (DesignMode)
{
  writer.RenderEndTag();
}
}