Scott Hanselman

The Woe: The ASP.NET Designer has screwed me again! (All my HTML and stuff is changed)

January 19, 2005 Comment on this post [1] Posted in ASP.NET | Bugs
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Matthew Adams calls it "The Woe" and has six great tips to help you work around it.  Here's his great description:

You have been happily working in the designer, laying out controls, binding in bits of logic, switching between the code view and the designer view, building, debugging. Then, all of a sudden, half your controls disappear, and/or some move to the top left, and/or all your embedded resources (images in particular) vanish without trace... Control-Z doesn't seem to work quite right... The black gloom of despair fogs the monitor, and you're forced to go and get a really strong cup of coffee. Before you start again.

Some folks see this all the time, others not often at all. Word is, this will be a thing of the past once ASP.NET 2.0 ships, but most of us will be dealing with ASP.NET 1.x for at least the next two years, if not longer.

Here is a summary of his six tips and you can get the complete commentary in his post "What has the designer done now?

Tip 1 - If you have a saved, corrupted file and are trying to recover from the woe, clean up the orphaned fields so that you can reuse the names.
Tip 2 - Always do a complete solution build before attempting to open any designers.
Tip 3 - Always close all of the designer windows before closing the solution.
Tip 4 - Close all designer windows before doing a build.
Tip 5 - In Case of Woe, Don't Panic. Don't press save. Don't press undo. Just close the designer window (and any applicable code windows) and say "no - I don't want to save the changes".
Tip 6 - Remove the references to the assemblies that contain the controls that vanished, and add them back again.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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January 23, 2005 13:02
Imho this is poster case showing MSFT hires lot of people and sometime idiots are not found and fired fast enough. boy how i hate whoever that piece of human refuse who wrote code for designer: "oh, problems with your controls? I will delete all such controls - no more problems! ". whoever that person is he DELETED MONTHS of my life and looks like from uncountable others.

MSFT could have shown a bit more respect to their developers. If by second release of product it still can delete half of their work in one click: perhaps it just worth not only fixing it, but actually making fixes publicly avaiable? try as i might i can't see singly reason why give everybody broken product and make it extremely hard to get fixes (and they do have fixes for this) http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/nenoloje/archive/2004/06/18/16952.aspx

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.