Visual Studio 2005 drives me nuts

[Crazy Cat]

It's one thing to lose productivity because of mistakes I make, but
when productivity is lost because of the development tool that is
frustrating. For example I've noticed there are times when a form can
become unviewable in the designer leaving the developer with having to
attempt to make fixes to the designer.vb code with only the fairly
cryptic error message thrown be designer to guide him. I've had files
removed from inclusion in the project -- this may have been something
I inadvertently did, however what was frustrating was that the only
clue I had was that the item had been replaced with a 'blank paper'
icon which is not well documented (even a tooltip would be nice). On
another occasion I found myself unable to make changes to my form in
designer -- I couldn't delete, add, or move controls on a particular
form (note the controls were NOT locked). The only solution turned out
to be shutting down VS and restarting. I hope that the next version
2008 is more robust, as I can't recall these kind of problems with VS
6.

Is it just me????

 

[Jeff Gaines]

Is it just me????

No it's not, in fact I thought it was just me

I find Tab Controls the worst offenders, I often go back to a tab page and
it is empty - although all the items are still in the properties
explorer/combo. I also find after a few hours use that the icons in the
Toolbox are all the same and unrecognisable, looks like a resource issue
to me.

 

[schneider]

Yes,

In general the designers have gotten progressively worse since VS2003 and
even VS2003 could not compete with VS6.

Eric Schneider

 

[Ross Culver]

It's so funny! I just came to the forum specifically to complain {about how
when some errors occur (for instance SplitterDistance must be between
Panel1MinSize and Width - Panel2MinSize) and that white page error message
appears which prevents me from fixing my mistake}and the very first posting
I see is someone else complaining about the same thing!

I appreciate the notice, but at least let me easily fix the problem instead
of making me open the designer (which isn't easy to find) and fix it in the
code. You don't even get a error list link to quick get to the code!

I love VS2005, but this is more than a little irritating.

Ross

 

[Brendon Bezuidenhout]

I know this is not a nice thing to do and in some situations (like me where
I work with over 1/2 million lines across several projects in 1 solution) it
painfully slow and time consuming...

Clean the solution
CLOSE the form design view
Rebuild the solution
then view your form in design view

If this doesn't work the 1st time after a clean close the form design again
and then reopen it... Regrettably there is no way around this as yet...
Although 2008 does give more descriptive messages and line numbers now