Windows Forms inheritance

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C#

Visual-Studio

VS2010

forms

I've got a bunch of very similar forms in my windows application, so I'm trying to use one as a master form and inherit from it for the other forms.
So the first form is declared:

public partial class NewItemForm : Form

and subsequent ones as (for example)

public partial class NewDerivedForm : NewItemForm

My program seems to compile and execute just fine, but the VS2010 designer is just going nuts when I try to load the derived forms on the designer surface, showing various errors at various times, most having to do (I believe) with the auto-generated code in the NewDerivedForm.Designer.cs file. Googling led me to "Inheriting Forms Using the Inheritance Picker Dialog Box" in MSDN. The article is relevant to VS2003, however, and I don't think that VS2010 has an Inheritance Picker Dialog Box.

I'm seeing a couple of red flags. Most all of my googled results make mention of this 'inheritance picker' that I can't find, most seem to be quite old, and most of the results are discussing Visual Basic, not C#. And needing an 'inheritance picker' makes me think that this is not as straightforward as I had thought.

So the question: Is what I'm trying to do inherently (pardon the small pun) bad, not the right approach? Is there a trick I'm missing? A better way to approach the problem?

I know some of this is vague, I'm trying to keep it general rather than post a couple of hundred lines of code and error messages. Any insights or guidance are appreciated.