Controls disappear from the Windows Forms Designer in VS2k3

We recently ran into the problem mentioned in the title of this post at work. Microsoft has a knowledgebase article (kbid 842706) for this bug. The hotfix is not to be distributed freely, but I already spoke to some people who have contacted Microsoft and got the fix for free. It will be e-mailed to you.

As you can read in the comments of this post at dotnetjunkies, there are some people who found no more problems after installing hotfixes KB841870 and KB841767-X86… I think that’s weird (but I’m not arguing!) because these two articles are about Crystal Reports and the rearrangement of controls, not the removal of them. But hey, we’ll give it a try!

There is a more easy solution, however. Most of the time, this kind of behaviour is common for user controls which reside in the same solution as the rest of the project. By removing the user control from the main solution and placing them in their own separate solution, the problem can often be resolved. Just add a reference to the output of the project in the separate solution, and most of the times your control will stay where it’s supposed to stay. If that doesn’t help: try contacting Microsoft for a hotfix…

• dotnet
• Visual Studio