<p>The team in which I work has been getting problems with the visual inheritance of the forms in the Java platform.</p>

<p>We want to develop a base JFrame with some controls in it and to have inherited forms from that base JFrame. The designer of the Netbeans 6.1 does not paint the controls of the base form in the inherited ones, so we can´t use it in the way we want. In the execution time the inherited forms are well painted, with the parent´s controls.</p>

<p>The Netbeans designer</p>

<p>Anyone has solved it? Should we change of IDE?</p>

Just a general comment, not a real answer to your situation - visual components aren't made for inheritance. For example, see the horrible blunder Sun made by inheriting everything from Component- now you have a JList which you can't use .add() on to add items to. Unless you can fulfill the entire super-class contract (and I know only of several classes that can) prefer composition rather than inheritance. Expose the methods you do plan on fulfilling and a "Component getAsComponent()" method with the explicit declaration that the component shouldn't be changed directly. I find that much easier than having to think about "what should I do if someone uses add(JLabel) to my component? or setLayout()?".
Regarding your specific predicament - I'm using JFormDesigner in IntelliJ IDEA but it might apply as well. JFD has a nice way of using the component BeanInfo information (for component named "MyThingy" the info class would be "MyThingyBeanInfo"). Using that class you can define a lot of things for design-time only consumption, along with special painting methods and other niceties.