Designer Can't load Form
Please can someone from Microsoft explain why often the Visual Studio Designer can't load a form. In short the red banner that the designer displays instead of a form's design.
There was a thread on this subject 'designer can't load form. Where is 'more information'?', but no conclusion was reached as far as I can see.
In my most recent problem with this, rebuilding had no effect, and eventually it was fixed by simply closing all documents, closing Visual Studio, and re-opening the project - no changes were made! However more often the affected form is not recovereable at all.
This is obviously a major issue in Visual Studio and seems to occur randomly. Certainly no code changes are required to break a form (or to fix it in the most recent instance).
I have lost entire forms shortly after completing their development which might have taken months. There is no suggestion of what might cause the problem. The list of 'error messages' is just an internal call stack which gives no clue as to what the error is.
While it is possible to recover the code from the source file, recreating the visual design and re-wiring up the events is time consuming and invalidates the test phase which also takes weeks. More importantly it should not have to be done at all if no changes have been made to the form. As far as I can tell, this is a bug in Visual Studio which occasionally corrupts the form design during saving.
I think it's time Microsoft provides a concise explaination why they sometimes display this message and provide an official recovery process to recover the affected forms.
I also think the next release of Visual Studio should notify the developer of the specific reason it cannot load a form rather than the generic error message currently used. This would allow the developer to simply fix the problem rather than recreating the form. This does not seem unreasonable to me, and I'm a little surprised this information is currently withheld.
