I have one project with my forms, etc. and one DLL-Project with UserControls and extended Controls, all with .Net4.5.1 and WinForms. A few weeks ago I did a migration from VS-Net2013 but the custom controls I'm talking about did not exist at that time. With every edit in my form inside Designer the new Form.Designer.cs is missing the instantiation of my custom gridview. All other parts regarding this control are still in the designer-code.
public class RichGridView : DataGridView { ... }
The missing part in Form.Designer.cs is:
this.dataDGV = new RichGridView(Definitions.DataType);
I can put this line back for myself into the designer-code but that's not how it should be. I was checking whether there are other files where VS might store information about the controls handled in its designer file but didn't found something. A while ago the designer has thrown away that line only a couple of times, so I could edit my form in the designer-window without problems and very seldom the instantiation was thrown away, now with every edit.
The other Project containing the DLL with my custom controls was compiled successfully and available for my Forms-Project, furthermore there was no change at all in the other project. If the point is that the custom control is outside the Forms-Project: I had to do this due to constraints in VS when dealing with UserControls regarding 32 vs 64 bit and debugging possibilities.
Not sure if there is some part of my code necessary for this question.
Related
I have a Winforms project with a FormMain.cs. I can build the project without error and it functions as a start up project.
However, when I click on FormMain.cs to access the design view, I see the following design-time error list:
Could not find type
'UserControlsTabbed.UserControlTabPanel'.
Please make sure that the assembly that contains this type is
referenced. If this type is a part of your development project, make
sure that the project has been successfully built using settings for
your current platform or Any CPU.
and
The variable 'userControlTabPanel1' is either undeclared or was
never assigned.
I certainly recall using the design view of FormMain.cs. I recall placing userControlTabPanel1 in a tableLayoutPanel cell within FormMain.cs. I did not have any design-view errors at that time. That was perhaps 100-150 version ago in my code repository. I have not had any need to access the design view of FormMain.cs until now.
The second error message is especially confusing. Opening FormMain.Designer.cs I see that the auto-generated code contains both the declaration and assignment.
I am confused as to why the winforms application executes without issue but the design-view has errors. Any assistance would be appreciated.
There are a number of issues causing this problem.
Project Platform target must be set to x86.
TableLayoutPanel do not support visual inheritance. Instead, use containers that support visual inheritance such as GroupBox, Panel, SplitContainer, or TabControl.
Inheriting usercontrols that do not conform to 1. and 2. of this list causes errors in the design-view.
By implementing the above 3 observations in my solution I was able to successfully remove the Design-time errors.
We have a complicated legacy form built in Winforms that recently has started seriously misbehaving and it gets worse and worse as time goes on. Just opening the form in design view will alter the layout of the form, sometimes in minor ways (a control is resized to be a pixel smaller) and sometimes in major ways (a component is moved to X position -6582). Due to the size of this form and the nature of the generated .Designer.cs referring to the diff is almost usually useless to determine whether the changes that were made to the form were the changes that you actually intended.
Based off a number of suggestions I found in other questions:
visual studio 2005 designer moves controls and resizes Form
Visual Studio keeps resizing my form without me telling it to, help!
Controls moving in vs2008 design mode on build
AutoScaleMode is set to None. I experimented briefly with various monitor resolutions, to no avail. Ultimately we decided to stop relying on anchors and instead use a combination of TableLayoutPanels and Dock properties. And that's when the trouble really started...
After heavily redesigning one of the hairier tabs on this form, when I tried to save Visual Studio spun for 2-3 minutes and reported "Could not load file or assmbly 'MyProject, Verion=X.X.X.X, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified" (as seen here: Visual Studio 2013 Can't save, build, or rebuild solution). This happened whenever the form attempted to save. After following the advice in the accepted answer, I was able to save/build again.
Attempting to run not much later resulted in a very, very long build time and a completely empty form (as seen here: All controls on a form are invisible and https://stackoverflow.com/a/5524183/1015495 ). All calls to Controls.Add had been removed from the designer (I assume this massive change is what resulted in the long build time). I restored the form to a previous version and began recreating my changes. Now, much more insidiously, certain controls have had all of their children removed.
Working within this form is becoming a timesink at best and unfeasible at worst. The solutions that I've found online basically boil down to "recreate the form manually" or "don't use Winforms". Unfortunately neither of these are an option right now. How can we mitigate the problems that we're having with this form in the mid-term future until we can come up with a proper fix?
I am working through an almost identical problem at the moment and mine seems to be a bug in Visual Studio 2013 related to having a "linkLabel" control on a User Control, which is on one of the tabs of a tab control on the main form.
I had other linkLabel controls on the parent form that did not cause any issues. The weird thing is that not ALL of the tabs were messed up, only some of them. I can only conclude that it gets through part of the layout restructuring, hits the user control, and bombs out, failing to finish the layout correctly. I attached a second version of visual studio to try to catch exceptions, and saw various status lines showing up in the debugger, but did not see any exceptions thrown. I am not that familiar with doing that, so it's possible I did that wrong though.
I could revert the code back to after I had added the user controls, but before VisualStudio opened the form in the designer and automatically re-generated the designer code. At this point, opening the form in the designer will always cause exactly the same design failures. As long as I never opened the code in the designer again, everything would work correctly at run time.
If I removed any reference to the custom user controls with link labels, the designer would also open without any trouble. At first I assumed I had an error in my own code so I started commenting things out, but it was still happening even with just the basic elements dragged on. So then I started removing elements and adding them back one at a time to see what broke it. In my case this turned out to be the "linkLabel" control. I am not sure if there are other controls that will do this yet. For now I just plan on re-writing the code to not use a link label on the user control though and see how well that goes.
I'm using Visual Studio 2010 and when I create a form, I get a FormName.Designer.cs file with all the auto generated code.
This is exactly what I want, however, when I do the following:
Created an empty class.
Subclass System.Windows.Forms.Control
Add a System.Windows.Forms.ImageList to the designer.
Add images to the ImageList in the designer.
All of the auto generated code gets dropped in my class file and I don't get a *.Designer.cs file.
How do I get VS to always use a *.Designer.cs file?
Update
Declaring a class partial and subclassing UserControl is not sufficient. I had to select "UserControl" when I created a new Item, then I got a designer.cs file.
This is normal and the way the designer worked in versions of Visual Studio before VS2005, versions that did not yet support partial classes. You only get the separate Designer.cs file for a class that's derived from Form or UserControl and you declared them with the partial keyword.
Not 100% sure what's the underlying reason, but surely it has something to do with the very simple designer for the Control class. The designers for Form and UserControl are much fancier.
Nothing actually goes wrong so this is not a real problem. There is very little bang for the buck, especially since it is so uncommon to actually need another component or control when you create a custom control. Getting the Properties window to work is a convenience but, in my personal experience, isn't worth the considerable annoyance of getting the designer page by default when you double-click the class in the Solution Explorer window. I lost count of the number of times I shouted "crud!" at the machine.
After several days of happily hacking away on this C# app using Visual Studio 2008, I get struck by a barrage of error dialogs showing:
Code generation for property 'valueMember' failed.
Error was: 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object.'
This happens now often when I make a tiny change in the designer, e.g. shift a control a few pixels, and then try to save. Several such error dialogs appear each second, keeping me busy cancelling all those by hammering the Enter key while trying to get alt-F4 to get VS to close.
Eventually I do get VS to close and to save the changes I made. After restarting VS, I do "clean" on the entire project, then "build" and everything works fine, the app runs fine, no problems.
Until I make another slight change in the form designer.
I don't know about any property valueMember in my app.
This makes me crazy, it is a real showstopper for my project. Any help is appreciated.
Try to Close and reopen the Visual Studio. maybe it seem silly, but it works!!
You can debug the designer using another visual studio and attach to process. If you got exception it should be easy to find it that way.
In general when openning the designer the constructor and of course initializeComponent is running.
As this is happening at design time, it is likely that you have a custom control which requires a parameter or other value which does not have a default.
When in design view in Visual Studio; a control instance is created to render it on the visual editor, but if the control requires a property to be set before it can be rendered, it will result in an error.
Can you check that all custom controls have default values, and anything referenced in the constructor that cannot have a default is wrapped by DesignMode property - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.component.designmode.aspx.
Similiar to #Chanipoz's answer (close/re-open) my component-rich/user-controls-everywhere forms app started to compile happily after I closed down the main form designer window.
I've had this code stack for years and have never seen the error until today. Not sure where it's coming from. But, something today about having the form open in the designer made everything unhappy. Simply closing it off of the screen made it all go smooth.
Use another instance of Visual Studio to attach to the first instance of visual studio.
Go to Debug-> Attach To Process and look for the devenv.exe process. Since you'll have two devenv.exe processes running you'll probably want to pick the one with the lower ID, that's usually the first instance of visual studio that was run.
I had to face this problem. As I have found the solution below
I am facing this issue in my customized control.
we need to implement like this
[Browsable(false)]
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Hidden)]
public MyCustomclass _Prperty { get; set; }
I had to face this problem. As I have not found the solution (much inheritance), I can tell:
.SuspendLayout() and .ResumeLayout() may be missing in code or one of them. The same is with .BeginInit() and .EndInit(). It is expected between them, that there will be = new ... and some settings for properties. Maybe someone facing this problem would find the solution with this information.
The problem is missing initialization code for a public property on the control. This will be added for you when you add the control to the designer, but if you replace a control with a derived control, or update the component, then the designer does not know how to deal with this.
If you have a control (wincontrol) with a public property PropertyA, and you add it to a form (myForm), then the designer will add all the necessary initialization for properties into myForm.Designer.cs. Something like;
Wincontrol1.PropertyA = new List<widget>();
It is not uncommon to need to modify a control slightly, lets say we have a new control MyWinControl
public partial class MyWinControl : WinControl
{
public List<wodget> PropertyDer1;
protected List<wodget> PropertyDer2;
}
If you sub this new control for the old control in myForm.Designer.cs, then you may well encounter this issue. The reason is that PropertyDer1 has no initialization in the winforms designer. PropertyDer2 won't cause any issues because it is protected. Similarly if you had a custom component and you add a new public property after the component has been added to a form.
If however, you deleted the instance of WinControl on the form, and dragged an instance of the MyWinControl onto the form instead, the proper initialization would occur and you would not see the error. The designer will have created the new control like this
Wincontrol1.PropertyA = new List<widget>();
Wincontrol1.PropertyDer1= new List<wodget>();
There are two easy solutions that do not require hiding the property from the designer.
1. If the property doesn't need to be public, give it the right modifier
2. If the property does need to be public, then just edit the code in the myForm.Designer.cs as in the code above to add the missing initializer
If could be of help I just detected a case that brings that same error message, impossible to take away :
I am developing an application in French, and I had to create a ToolStripMenuItem with an accented word in it like "annulées".
The system generated a menu item like "annuléesToolStripMenuItem" and the accent is the culprit.
Enough to delete the item, create it again in English and the just change the Text property of the menu item.
Hope it will be of some help.
I have a winforms application that I am writing in C# - in Visual Studio 2010. I have one specific form that keeps corrupting itself every other day or so - according to TFS, it looks like most of the file is re-written by the designer when I have made only the smallest changes. (location of buttions, etc.) Things fall off strips, toolbars, etc. as well as errors just trying to use the designer. See my other post Here. (Thought I figured this out, but I guess not)
Here is an example piece of code that goes missing - when I put it back in, it takes it back out when I save the file. The code was generated by the designer in a previous file version.
this.statusStrip1.Items.AddRange(new System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem[] {
this.tssEmployeeName,
this.tssLoadTime,
this.tssSpring,
this.tssHomeLocation,
this.tssTotal,
this.tssDue});
Is there any way of 're-generating' the [file].Designer.cs file? Or should I bite the bullet and re-do this form? (pain with over 100 components on this one...) It's the only form I have a problem with out of the 35 or so in the project.
VS 2010 w\ SP1.
Thanks, Andrew
I've experienced this before, although I'm not sure if my issues were exactly the same.
Try putting a handful of problem controls, such as your StatusStrip control and its children, into separate User Controls. Then add those User Controls to the main form instead. At the very least, you can prevent the designer from rewriting those controls.