The new SharePoint designers in Visual Studio 2012 are a great productivity booster, and it’s now much easier to create Site Columns, Content Types and List Definitions.

Today I came across some peculiar behaviour in the List [definition] designer when it came to configuring the lists Content Types.

I’d added a custom content type to the list and wanted to remove the default Item and Folder content types, but right clicking these content types in the designer showed a disabled “Delete” option;

If you edit the list definition schema.xml file, you can manually remove those ContentType references, and then re-entering the designer shows correctly.

<List xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint" Title="Organisation Leaders" FolderCreation="FALSE" Direction="$Resources:Direction;" Url="Lists/Organisation Leaders" BaseType="0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" EnableContentTypes="TRUE">
  <MetaData>
    <ContentTypes>
      <ContentType ID="0x0100C26D5A3749D6453F9CCC4E5A72419A57" Name="Organisation User" Group="Platinumdogs Custom Content Types" Description="A content type representing an organisation user." Inherits="TRUE" Version="0">
        <FieldRefs>
          <FieldRef ID="{9A377E88-F39C-445E-B09C-BD91AE5B3766}" DisplayName="Organisation User" Required="TRUE" Name="pdogOrganisationUser" />
        </FieldRefs>
      </ContentType>
    </ContentTypes>
    ...
  </MetaData>
</List>

However, spending a few minutes scratching my head, I notice the little triangle next to a content type in the list designer;

Clicking this little McGafter, enables these default ContentTypes, allowing you to remove them using the designer, just right-click and choose Delete.