I have a form which is inherited by several other forms. In the Sub New, there are several calls to object methods which cause exceptions to be thrown (as the objects don't exist at design time) when I try to design the child forms. I can get around this by commenting out these calls whilst I am designing the child forms. However, I need to remember to uncomment the calls before compiling and distributing, and I have a cruddy memory, so is there a way I can detect how the form is being run so that the method calls are only made when the application is being run?