Moving from VS2003 to VS2005 solutions

[Rich]

I have a solution that is in development under VS2003 and has been 'ported'
to VS2005. The painful experience of running this newer version of VS
revolves around one form. This form is very dense in controls and has
difficulty in VS2003 when changes were being made to the form in question
( as if the entire code behind was being rewritten adding the new lines of
code behind -- albiet very predictable and stable ). The experience is
VS2005 is much worse (unpredictable and very unstable -- ie. losing its way
and locking up and dumping all codebehind in the form and the designer goes
to lunch and doesn't come back .. etc.). My question is this -- WOULD my
taking areas of this heavily control populated form and putting those areas
in a user control and then adding that user control to the form reduce the
lag in dealing with this form?

Rich ... thinking of step one .. not wanting to think of step two

 

[Joergen Bech]

If you are talking about collections of controls situated on
tab pages, you could consider creating a usercontrol for each
tab page, containing the controls originally found on those pages.
When running the form, add those usercontrols programmatically
when needed, rather than at design time. Alternately, load all the
controls in code if you can.

In some cases I have worked with forms containing a 3rd-party
docking windows framework, i.e. when dragging the toolbar/menu
manager to the form, a number of "hidden" controls would be added
to the form. Working with the form in the designer afterwards, I often
found that it was easy to mess up the docking framework and I would
have to start all over again. The solution was to carefully design the
form, then move all the designer-generated code outside the designer-
controlled area and initialize it myself. I would get an empty form if
I opened it in the designer, but at least it worked when I ran it.
All the time.

Bit of a pain to work with, but if you have a form which is "dense
in controls", perhaps there is an interface design (or "user
experience") problem that should be dealt with first.
....
I am not making excuses for Microsoft, but until a service pack
appears for the VS IDE, we just have to work around those problems.

/JB