If I read some code like that, I would expect a comment like:

  // silly hack to get the tab control into a good state.
  // it gets confused when ...
  // and this seems to fix it.

Because setting a property can be a function call, it isn’t necessarily a no-op to set a property to itself.

Having said that, the code is still quite bad but maybe it was auto generated by a ui builder or refactoring tool.