I'm designing a program for my PDA and worked out the GUI last night before bed. I saved the project, "debugged" it on the emulator and my PDA (just to see how it would look), and since I was happy with it, shut down the computer for the night.

This morning, I fired up the computer and tried opening up the project to continue working on it. It seems, however, that I can only get the code view. I can still "debug" it and the form will show correctly on the emulator and on my device, but I can't see it on the screen without running it. I added a form to the project just to see if I can see the design view for it, and I can, but not for the original form I made last night.

I'm new to the Visual Studio .NET line of products; last version I used was VB6, and that was a long time ago. So, this may seem a little rediculous, but I'm a newbie to this. Any help would be appreciated.

What kinds of modifications did you make to the form class that isn't show up?

I have seen this behavior in VS 2003 when changing web forms. If you change the class a web form inherits from (from System.Web.UI.Page to a custom class) VS chokes up and doesn't know how to "design" your page class.

I've seen where after you create a form and have it open in the designer things behave. Then you change the class and things act a little funny, but the designer is still present. However, then you close the design view of a form, then open it up again, VS can't figure out how to load the designer for the form, so the design view of the form is not available.

It's possible you are experiencing this problem with windows forms. I wouldn't be surprised.

If you have changed the class that your form is derived from, you can try this workaround:

1. Open the form code.
2. Change the derived class back to the default (System.Windows.Forms.Form).
3. Close the form code.
4. Open the form normally (into the designer view).
5. Open form code again.
6. Change the derived class back to your class.

This is annoying, granted, but it seems to be the only way to work around the designer. I've used this process with web forms, hopefully it will work for windows forms.

-Peter

I've since given up on the issue. I hadn't made it very far into the program I was writing so I just started over. I have since tried to reproduce the problem but was unsuccessful. For what it's worth, I don't remember ever touching the form class file. The only thing I did with the form was draw objects on it (buttons and a menu, at that), and then started adding code to the buttons and menus.

Oh well...Thanks for you reply!