Hello,

I have some basic controls (e.g., checkboxes, textboxes,listboxes, etc)in a nested tab control (one tab control on the tab page of another tab control) and when I debug (F5) my application, everything looks fine. However, when I exit the application and am dumped back into the IDE designer, some of the controls have "disappeared". Sometimes there is a dotted line around their bounding box, as if they're selected but behind something.

I can't find out why the controls disappear, where they go, or how to get them back. The only way I know to get them back is to restart Visual Studio 2005. I don't have any code that hides or unhides controls and it's my understanding that all controls should be shown in the editor anyway, even if their visible property is set to false.

Any help would be appreciated, as this is very annoying and is really slowing down my development work.

Thanks,
Neville

Hi Neville,

Thanks for posting, I will move your question to Windows Forms Designer Team so that they will be able to provide a better answer for you.

Regards,

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Andrew Pechersky, VS Diagnostics Team. The posting is provided "AS IS".

Hi NevilleBonwit,

I can't reproduce the problem with Visual Studio 2005. Here's the steps I am trying to reproduce.

1. Create a Windows Form project in Visual Studio 2005.
2. Drag a TabControl to the Windows Form.
3. Drag a TabControl to a TabPage of the previous TabControl(You call this nest tabcontrol, right?)
4. Drag some controls to the tabPage of the nested TabControl.
5. Run the application. see the same result as desinger.
6. Exit the application, no controls disappear.

Am I doing something different from you?

Best regards,
Bruce Zhou

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Hello Bruce,

It sounds like what you are doing is what I am doing. Not all the controls disappear all of the time. It's some of the controls some of the time.

I figured out tonight that when I click and drag (e.g., select with a bounding box) over an area where there is a control that is disappeared, it will show up in the properties area, but the actual control graphics in the designer window are still hidden.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Neville

It seemed I met this problem before, but really hard to reproduce it when I am trying now. In order to exclude the possibilty that it's a project specific problem, you can create a new project and check if this problem still exist.

Best regards,
Bruce Zhou

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This started happening to me in one of the forms in my project. The form has labels, text boxes, group boxes, buttons, and they all get hidden when I recompile/run the project. Then I have to do ctrl-a (select all) and Format/Order/Bring to Front to get them visible again. And this happens every time I recompile or run (F5) the project. The project has other forms that behave normally. This form used to work ok for a few months and started doing it all of a sudden. It's gonna be next to impossible to reproduce because the form used to work fine previously. I can remember it happening at least one time before, but the form where it happened got ditched so I didn't pay too much attention to it.

Because it's hard to reproduce, I don't have high hopes for this bug getting fixed though. Just thought to post here and mention that it really is happening and is very annoying, maybe to a point that I'm gonna have to create a new form from a scratch. Btw, if all bugs were easily reproducible, fixing bugs would be easy.

Sounds like you guys are getting low on system resources. Too many applications running? Just my thoughts.

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MCP