"The Path is Not of Legal Form" - even with SP1 Beta

[Chris Mullins]

The biggest downside to VS.Net 2005 and WinForms development has to be that
horrible "The Path is not of legal form" argument.

Anytime we build complex GUI's or controls, the designer don't view.

I was sure hoping the current Service Pack (even though it's beta) would fix
this. Alas, VS.NET 2005 is still broken.

The only way to fix this is to eliminate cross assembly references (aka:
Project References), and do everything using all static binary references.
This isn't practical most of the time - essentially in a large system that's
cleanly architected.

Ah well. Orcas anyone?

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

The biggest downside to VS.Net 2005 and WinForms development has to be
that horrible "The Path is not of legal form" argument.

Anytime we build complex GUI's or controls, the designer don't view.

I have never experienced this problem. Does the path contain the character
"#"?

 

[Chris Mullins]

This shows up for us as soon as we start implementing user controls, and
base window classes ("public abstract class PropertyDialog : Window") that
reside in other assemblies.

When these assemblies are part of the project, and you have a project level
reference, this problem shows up... frequently. Not all the time, but
certainly most. It also seems to need a project of a certain complexity.
Every attempt to re-create it in a small project has failed.

It's unbelievable frustrating, and has single-handadly made me prefer web
development over WinForms.

It affects all of our developers, and most of our clients. We have long
paths, but nothing with weird characters.