Winforms Inheritance and MenuStrip

Hi There, I hope you are well.

I'm building a form hierarchy using VS2005 Beta 2. My base form has the minimum MenuStrip items required for all forms. I have changed each menu item to a "protected" access modifier to allow inherited forms to further extend these controls.

Upon inheriting this base form for the first time, I quickly realized the menu strip is non-editable in inherited forms at design time, regardless of the parent modifier.

Am i missing some fundamental here? How can the child form have design time inheritance to the menu strip?

Thanking you in advance for your advice.
Kind regards. Scott.

[649 byte] By [ScottAtRVC] at [2007-12-16]