If you do anything "out of the ordinary" in your UserControl or Form derived classes in Visual Studio 2005, let me introduce you to a little snippet that will probably save you lots of headaches:if ( DesignMode ) return; or, its equally useful counterpartif(!DesignMode){ doStuff(); } Now, the "out of the ordinary" thing I was doing was...hooking up an instance EventHandler using a static property that exposes a Form derived class in an OnLoad override. What? I know, not the clearest situation, and probably one that could use a boatload of refactoring, but it works. In short, if you are having designer problems in...

One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while others may require code changes. The designer loader did not provide a root component but has not indicated why. Hide     at System.ComponentModel.Design.DesignSurface.get_View()at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Design.WindowPaneProviderService.CreateWindowPane(DesignSurface surface)at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.Serialization.CodeDom.DeferrableWindowPaneProviderService.CreateWindowPane(DesignSurface surface)at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSDesignSurface.Microsoft.VisualStudio.Designer.Interfaces.IVSMDDesigner.get_View()  It looks like there are a lot of people that got this error when going from beta2 -> RC1, but this was on the RTM version. The thing that's tricky is that now the designer is so nice for us, it adds default values to public properties. Well, since the code...

Is the insert snippet chord in VS 2005.

I've been chasing down this odd Visual Studio bug where the Enter, Backspace, and Arrow keys stop working. It happened to me in Redmond at Microsoft Campus (of all places!) and it's a known bug that a lot of others have run into apparently. Some folks have noted that it happens with the Beta 2 build, but the link above claims that it is gone from later builds. Sorry, wrong answer, kimo-sabe. Even on the RC build, this showed up. It has to do with how Visual Studio handles USER SETTINGS. Thanks to a comment in ScottH's blog, I found a command line switch (devenv...