When you’re building usercontrols in a Windows Phone 7 project, it’s often necessary to know whether the code is running in Design Mode (i.e. being invoked by the Visual Studio IDE or by Expression Blend), or whether you’re actually running in the real program.

It’s a trivial matter, really, but it can be hard to remember exactly how to do it when I need it, so I wrapped it in an IsInDesigner function:

    Public Function IsInDesigner() As Boolean
        Return System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool
    End Function