VS2003 crash; recover project?

[KR]

I have VS.net 2003 professional on WinXP. I'm not a hardcore programmer, and
I kind of poke my way around the interface (I'm sure there are lots of
better ways to do things that what I know).

Anyway, I just put together a 1-form very simple CF project for my wife to
collect some data on her Ipaq 2215 (2003) PPC. My development PC froze up
right after I finished testing the project on the emulator (after about 8
hours of programming/testing cycles) and I was forced to reboot the PC.

Although I had clicked on "save all", on reboot the recent projects don't
include this project, and the emulator ended up soft-rebooting, so I can't
even lift the final file(s) off of that for my wife to use.

Now, in the project folder I see projectname.sln and projectname.suo and a
folder called projectname, but only the .suo seems to be close on the most
recently modified time and it gives warnings when I try to click on it. When
I try to open the sln (solution) file from within VSNet, I get the object
browser and frmFocal.vb (my project name is Focals) but there is only a few
lines of auto-code in it. In the solutions explorer, Form1.vb in my project
has an exclamation mark on it, and when I click on it, it indicates "the
item 'Form1.vb' does not exist in the project directory. It may have been
moved, renamed or deleted."

I've been poking around now to try to figure out how to recover my work, but
I lost- what should I do next? Is there any way to recover all my work?

Help!

Thanks,
Keith

 

[Daniel Moth]

Your project and solution files being corrupt is not a problem. What is
important is your .vb files. Create a brand new project and Add Existing
Items. Browse to the folder where your original project is and add all the
..vb files from there. If your .vb files don't have what you were expecting
them to have, then you are out of luck (you didn't save before deploying).

For future reference, go to Tools-Options and then under "Build and Run"
choose to "Save all changes"

Cheers
Daniel

 

[KR]

It appears that I am out of luck then- when I added the vb file from that
project, it was empty.

The frustrating thing is that I am extremely retentive about saving my work,
and I clicking on the "save all" button on the toolbar about every 15
minutes while working. However, when I look at the Focals.sln file
properties, it shows the last modified information as 1:59pm yesterday,
although I was working on it (and "saving all" frequently) up till my crash
at about 7pm. This makes me think that the base issue of a machine
freeze/crash was compounded by VS not working as it should in the first
place...

Well, I guess I know how I'll be spending the rest of today...

Thanks for the info on how to check the project file(s),
Keith

 

[KR]

Oops- forgot to mention- when I checked, my build and run options were set
to save all changes, so my guess is the file was sufficiently corrupt that
it dumped anything that might have been saved (if it really saved) when I
tried to re-open, just giving me the blank file. Given the age of the sln
file, I'm still suspicious about whether it really saved at all. Today I'll
not only save, but close and open VS occassionally to check and see if it is
saving.
Thanks,
Keith