There's only one thing I can say: aaaaaaaaaaaaaa (long scream). VS2008 is driving me up the wall. I get these IDE errors quite frequently; and a friend of mine even more often. It usually happens when either we copy some block of aspx code from some other place, or when we just created a new user control and manually registering it in the aspx, or just plain randomly without a rhyme or reason. Sometimes closing the aspx file and reopening it fixes the problem, sometimes we have to actually comment any code behind code then reopen the file and that does it. Other times, the majority, none of these work and we have to restart VS. In a few cases even a restart won't fix it and then we have to be creative -- basically try random weird things. In all these cases the aspx is valid and if we actually run the application it works fine, it's the IDE that has a problem generating the designer file. Is this a known problem or am I the only one, is there a bug that we can vote on? I've experienced similar issues in VS2005, but in VS2008 the number of these has grown exponentially :(

Thanks.

The good news ... you're not alone ... here are some related posts:

• controls not added to designer.cs
• Forcing regeneration of the designer.cs file
• Can't Reference New Controls by ID
  

The bad news ... there is no solution or work-around, that I'm aware of.

Well, thanks for the good news :)

My impression is that there's something that doesn't get cleaned up properly in the IDE because once you start seeing these errors is all downhill, but not always -- you may as well restart. The worst part is that you lose the trust. Is it me or the IDE? Here starts another witch hunt which completely distracts from what you were doing. Something that should have taken a second or two ends up taking minutes.

I really wish they would decouple the designer from the aspx editing. From some of the links you posted it gives me the impression that is somewhat tied to the designer; which I believe is true since sometimes switching to design view fixes the problem. There's no UI feedback telling me that the designer or something else is working. It should be a blocking operation; I'd prefer something like "please wait, updating the designer file" rather than me trying to guess when it's doing it and waiting or it may break. Arrr, so fragile; this needs to be fixed somehow.

Thanks.

I haven't seen any other mention of the differences in the header comment, Runtime versions ( see my first post here: controls not added to designer.cs ).

Could you please comment as to whether this is your experience as well. 

1. Yes, I always use WebApplication
2. Yes, I only switch to design view when I need to wire up an event handler, so most of the time I never see the designer
3. Happens in both aspx and ascx
4. Never noticed the version number, next time it happens I'll make sure to pay attention to the version number and let you know.

ASPX editing is not coupled to HTML designer. Name *.designer.cs file name somewhat misleading, it actually means "design-time generated code" it really has nothing to do with Design view. Now, if switching to and from Design view helps, perhaps IDE is not getting idle time, some hints here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2008/04/02/wireless-mouse-html-editor-and-idle-time-processing.aspx

I personally never use design view ... and I've heard the suggestion before that it might be related to lack of idle time ... but I highly doubt that that's the problem in my case.

When I've encountered the problem, it's been specific to an instance of an aspx/ascx file.  In those cases, the designer file never gets updated, whereas the designer file in other instances seems to continue to still work fine.

One thing I've noticed, which I pointed out in this post (controls not added to designer.cs), was that the header comment, in the designer file, shows different runtime versions between those where it's working and those where it's broken.

Something else that might be relevant is that this is an old project, created originally in VS2003, so it's using the WebApplication extension. 

Mikhail,

The coupling I was talking about it's not necessarily a hard coupling. I know that until you switch to design mode the "designer" will not even load, and the source view is fine without the designer being loaded. What I meant is that in some cases these errors will not go away until I switch to design mode, and hence the "coupling" I was talking about.

The idle time you mentioned may have something to do with this, I don't know, but what's interesting is that usually once I start getting these errors they won't stop. It's almost as if something gets stuck in the internals of the IDE and me waiting on it to finish doesn't seem to fix it.

Are you aware of a bug report on this? I couldn't find an existing report on this problem and I rather not create a duplicate; or if you guys already work on this I rather just wait.

I'm using Windows 2003, not Vista, although I have a wireless mouse is not a Microsoft wireless mouse, and the problems Rick was talking about are in the designer which I only use to wire up event handlers. 

Thank you.

grundt:

I haven't seen any other mention of the differences in the header comment, Runtime versions ( see my first post here: controls not added to designer.cs ).

Could you please comment as to whether this is your experience as well. 

The last few times I got the error the version number was always 2.0.50727.1433 for me.