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.
Related
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.
When opening a Form in the Visual Studio Designer, the generated designer files' contents get mixed up randomly. This includes the files
Form.Designer.cs and
Form.resx
When using a version control system this is a real nightmare.
Is there a way (extension?) that sorts and cleans up all designer files before saving? This would solve most of my VCS related issues with WinForms, as it reverses all the shuffling the designer does.
This problem sure does make merging difficult - I understand your pain.
Read this previous SO post:
"Why does C# designer-generated code (like Form1.designer.cs) play havoc with Subversion?"
Basically you could create a tool to sort all the code alphabetically to give order to the random placement of code, but it is a hack and could involve a lot of pain itself. Personally I recommend changing your work practices to reduce this occurring.
Reduce time between merges
Limit access to a form to 1 developer at a time.
Merge under the guidance of the developer who made the change, as they will know better what looks ok.
Don't open the designer, if you are only making a "code change", ie nothing changes visually.
Undo changes to the designer file before merges, if you are 100% sure that you didn't change anything.
This is not a tip about automatically sorting Form.Designer.cs; however, it does help with avoiding merge help with all modifications made to Form.Designer.cs-files by Visual Studio.
Instead of (or in addition to) changing your work practices (by Jonathon Lee) and especially the constricting "Limit access to a form to 1 developer at a time" do:
Ensure the Form.Designer.cs-file is organized according to Visual Studio in a separate commit before you make the real changes.
Trigger a reorganization of the Form.Designer.cs-file by Visual Studio
(For me, moving a control from one cell in a TableLayoutPanel to an other and back again did the trick.)
Commit Visual Studio's changes and mark them as nothing changed.
Make your modifications to the Form
Trigger a reorganization of the Form.Designer.cs-file by Visual Studio
Commit your changes and describing your work.
Results:
This helps reviewers to distinguish changes to review from noise.
This eases merging:
either, your version control system detects that two commits have the same effect and one is enough and it can merge without conflicts;
or, you manually resolve the conflict by applying just one of the cleanup commits and discard the other.
Does the visual studio IDE have an issue with eating up the contents of a winform made with custom controls? I have a few and haven't had a problem, but I made a form recently that was nearly 80% out of custom controls (those being made up usually of normal windform controls themselves).
I didn't have much of a problem making them, up until about yesterday when VS lost reference to what it was doing and I spent a day figuring it out. I had to delete about 3 controls and reposition them from the designer manually to get it to stop. It then affected one of my major forms, instead of stopping like I had thought I had fixed it. Seems it lost all calls to my custom controls, and after a few hours I did a clean solution/rebuild solution. A few controls were missing again, reassigned them and it was work.
About an hour later my project stopped saving, stating it couldn't find the project's position. I closed the IDE and reopened it, all my coding changes were saved and up to do, but every single custom control in my form was deleted. Repositioning them isn't going to be more then an hour or two, but is this a common issue for VS2010 and a good argument to go with another IDE, or is this just bad and random luck? Anyone have any experience with something like this?
All,
I have finished the GUI design phase... Now I've started to add meaningful names to all the controls in my application. Visual Studio is driving me nuts auto generating the events each time I click on the control to change its name (ok so it only happens when I mess up and double click... but still annoying).
Is there a way to temporarily disable this feature? I still want it because it is a great short cut when I'm coding.
Thanks!
You can't disable double clicking AFAIK but you can open document outline (Menu View > Other Windows > Document Outline), and rename the controls via F2 in this window. It'll be much faster and will help see easily the visual tree if your form is complex.
afaik there is not. Just be careful with your clicking and if you do mess up CTRL+Z CTRL+Z is your friend :)
If you can recognize which controls are which in code, you could open the .Designer.cs files and rename the controls there with the refactoring tool (right click the control name, Refactor, Rename).
It may or may not be straightforward to recognize which controls are which given that you have used generic names so far, but at least it's an option. Personally, I avoid that situation by immediately assigning meaningful names.
It's not just renaming controls, it's resizing them by dragging that is a bigger problem. CTRL+Z works to remove the auto-generated code but simultaneously undoes the resizing of the control. Very annoying.
With small projects, I can switch to design view almost instantly (< 1 sec).
I have a large project that takes about 60 seconds to open a control or form in design view - for the first time only. After this 60 second delay, I can open any control in the project in design view almost instantly - until I recompile the project.
If the exe built by this project is referenced in another (small) project, the small project instantly becomes as sluggish as the large project. Similarly, if I add all the files from the large project to the small project individually, the small project becomes as sluggish.
The large project references a large Managed C++ project, but if I add the same reference (and call a function from the reference to make sure it is loaded) to the small project, the small project is still fast.
My large project uses SandDock. If my small project uses SandDock, it's still fast.
My large project has about 60 user controls that appear in the toolbox. If I add 60 user controls to the small project, the small project is still fast.
If I make the user controls hidden from the toolbox with [System.ComponentModel.ToolboxItem(false)], the large project is still slow.
The problem occurs in both vs2005 and vs2008.
What could be making the large project so slow to open design view for the first time? Some other reference? The large number of controls? The large number of classes? Some other cause?
One thing I've noticed (though possibly a red herring) is that the ProjectAssemblies folder (C:\Documents and Settings\tim.gradwell\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectAssemblies) is huge (> 1GB) and most of the folders in here have a copy of my Managed C++ dll! These folders appear to get recreated every time the design view is re-opened (after a recompile). Could this have anything to do with the slowdown?
Further Info:
A toolstrip in the user control or form makes the form take 60 seconds to load. Removing the toolstrip (but still having several other different controls on the form) makes the switch to design view instant.
That's not the whole story though... A toolstrip in a brand new project doesn't cause massive slowdown - so there must be something in my big project which is affecting toolstrips. Also, certain other forms/controls that don't have toolstrips on them are still taking 60 secs to display the design view, so whatever it is that is affecting toolstrips is also affecting other controls too. I'll keep trying to nail down precisely which controls and maybe even what it is that's causing it!
Even though you have marked the classes to not appear in the Toolbox, Visual Studio still needs to scan all of your open projects to discover that. To speed things up, you need to turn off the setting to automatically populate the Toolbox. It can get a bit annoying if you do lots of work with the toolbox, but it will speed up things a lot.
The setting is in Tools -> Options -> Windows Forms Designer, set "AutoToolboxPopulate" to false.
The first answer: "The setting is in Tools -> Options -> Windows Forms Designer, set "AutoToolboxPopulate" to false" worked for me. The designer used to hang for at least a minute when trying to get focus on a control on a form when first looking at a form in design view. Now, it takes only a few seconds. (I didn't have enough reputation points to directly comment on that answer)
The same similar thing is happening with my 2005 in additon to that the devenv.exe hangs randomly
and even after "building" sometimes the custom controls tend to corrupt the main form
have you recently virus scanned and defragged?
I had this problem on a Win CE 6.0 project in Visual Studio 2005. The project uses System.Data.SQLite.dll v1.0.65.0. Each time I opened or recompiled the project, and then tried to open a form with a grid for design, there would be at least a 12-minute delay. Turns out it was generating 770-odd folders under "My Documents\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\8.0\Project Assemblies", most of which had a copy of just the SQLite dll.
The issue appears to be that I had referenced this DLL in the project from a "sibling" folder to my project. As an example:
Project folder: "...Projects\ThisAndThat\projectFolder"
DLL folder: "...Projects\ThisAndThat\projectFolderBin"
There may be other folder relationships that manifest this problem, but I did not investigate.
I moved the DLL into the "Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\CompactFramework\v2.0\WindowsCE" folder and the problem went away. I have a form with a tab control containing two tabs. Each tab contains a datagrid control. This form now loads almost instantly in the designer.
If anyone knows of a better solution, or what setting or behavior of VS2005 causes this issue, please add a comment.