2005 IDE Form corruption

[Marc Gravell]

Aaarrggghhh! Maybe I've just got lucky, but until now I haven't had such a
seemingly unrecoverable form corruption error...

I have a reasonably complex form (data-binding to sub-controls, events,
etc), which was working fine... until about an hour ago... Now, although the
form works fine when playing the app, whenever I go into the form designer I
get:

==============

One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are
listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while
others may require code changes.

The designer loader did not provide a root component but has not indicated
why.
Hide

at System.ComponentModel.Design.DesignSurface.get_View()
at
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Design.WindowPaneProviderService.CreateWindowPane(DesignSurface
surface)
at
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.Serialization.CodeDom.DeferrableWindowPaneProviderService.CreateWindowPane(DesignSurface
surface)
at
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSDesignSurface.Microsoft.VisualStudio.Designer.Interfaces.IVSMDDesigner.get_View()

============

The error is (seemingly) somewhere inside (suprise suprise)
InitializeComponent(), but this is too complex to present here... I guess my
question is:

"Does anybody have a clue where to start with this?"

I'm happy to start hacking the code, but with hundreds of lines it's a bit
needle/haystack. Curiously, I can *sometimes* get into the form if I have
just finished debugging, but not always - and it inevitably dies again when
I build, so not much help... I don't really fancy restarting my form from
scratch, and I seem to get the same issue with various archived VSS
copies...

Has anybody resolved this or similar before? Any common causes? (there's
little chance of me reproducing it in a "simple" version, so the question is
more general than specific).

Cheers in advance,

Marc

 

[Marc Gravell]

For ref, I eventually got the form working again by carving huge chunks out
of the initialise method and into separate controls which are only loaded at
runtime (and not design time).

I still have no idea what the error means or why it happened...

Marc

 

[Guest]

I have had a very similar experience - I converted a solution from VS2003 to
VS2005 and everything seemed just right. The application converted without a
problem, and it ran fine. But once I started modifying a form I started have
some problems in the InitializeComponent() method also. I had to back up
and continue developing it in VS2003 for the time being.

Jeff