The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for visually processing instance data. A visual placeholder for a data instance is provided as part of the design experience. A runtime configurable metadata store is provided to maintain the mappings between types and designers. Thus, configurations can be altered at the runtime of the control, rather than a fixed set of potential templates being provided at design time. Item presenters render contained data instances of a type using a designer specified in the metadata store. Item presenters can be used when a data instance is exposed as a property on the containing type. As such, property values can be visually moved to and from other properties, potentially within multiple owning objects.