Designers serialize themselves to code through an engine that searches through the live property values of objects and generates those values as code. So, for example, the text of a button is generated in the following format.

this.okButton.Text = "OK";

One of the limitations of this scheme is that it is difficult to retrieve a property from another location. For example, it is very difficult to emit code in the following format, because the only thing the code generator can rely on is the value in the property.

this.titleLabel.Text = this.Text;