Hi all,

I can't be the only one who experiences this, what I call the Alzheimer's Effect, butwhat must be a bug with VS. My questions are 1) do other people experience the bug (described below), and 2) has anyone found a functional workaround, including bug reports on the issue (my bug search came up empty except for toolstrip-specificissues)?

The issue

I tend to make forms with buttons (in Flat Style) that employ images (both background or foreground) with no text. I import the images through the property grid and everything works great... until some random time later when the designer can no longer load because it loses the reference to the My.Resources "property" for image(s). 9 out of 10 projects will never experience this issue and I am not really doing anything different for the one that does. I should note that the resources are definitely there and are not renamed or manipulated in any way. I can only imagine that the resource file has lost its pointer to the embedded resource itself. However, it must be with how the Designer accesses the resource because the images are always loaded at run time -- I just can;t see them in the designer (I can;t see anything because it throws a hard designer error with the red error message).

The problem can be worked around by adding a new image -- but with a different name (reloading with the same name will not resolve it) or by manually removing the class's Designer code that references the resource (thus causing the button control to be blank). Also, this occurs with toolstrip buttons at the same time as forms buttons.

However, this work around is short-lived at best because eventually (and more frequently the 2nd or 3rd time around) the same thing happens with the new images. It's like the project itself is corrupted. Eventually I have to give up and migrate my code to a new, fresh project and load in image resources afresh -- which can be a major pain! I've even had a case where I cut-and-pasted the form's controls to the new project and caused the new project to become corrupted. Very frustrating!

Any help (other than sympathy - but that's okay too)?

UPDATE:

I started this thread because it just happened to me with my current project - a user control. After posting I decided to start again by creating a new user control project. Just so I could confirm some of what I wrote above, I selected all the controls from the corrupted project's form designer (with no images set since I had to delete them all to see the designer again)and copied them to clipboard. I then pasted the controls into the new project's designer (for the user control) successfully.

Next I opened the Resources tab of project properties and manually added the PNG images into the resource manager, jumped back to the control designer and set each control's Image property to one of the embedded images (about 10 total). Everything worked fine.

I then started to work on another VS project and left this one open in the background of Windows and a few hours later activated this project again and tried to view the designer and... BAM! I got the error screen with the message...

The type 'MRF.My.Resources.Resources' has no property named '(the name of the image without extention)'.

at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomSerializerBase.Error(IDesignerSerializationManager manager, String exceptionText, String helpLink)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomSerializerBase.DeserializeExpression(IDesignerSerializationManager manager, String name, CodeExpression expression)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomSerializerBase.DeserializeAssignStatement(IDesignerSerializationManager manager, CodeAssignStatement statement)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomSerializerBase.DeserializeStatement(IDesignerSerializationManager manager, CodeStatement statement)

...One of these messages for each of my images. (Note: "MRF" is the name of the project's namespace.) I'm curious if maybe its the fact that the VS instance stayed idle for a few hours that has something to do with it. Thinking back I'd say it almost always occurs -- at least the first time -- after coming back to a project that has stayed open. ALso, I can;t say with certainty that it occurs with anything other than PNG images -- I use them to ahieve the transparency without having to resort to Transparency colors.

Any thoughts?

Edit: I found this MSDN help topic on the error object itself...

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tkxkyzsd.aspx

The basis of this error is that the Get call for the property is expecting a type that is different than the one being returned. It makes me wonder if there is something inherently wrong with the way the resource manager handles PNG images since it has to return a bitmap (sure, a PNG is a bitmap but maybe there's something in the transparency that's malfunctioning?)

same problem here

This also just happened to me for the first time. I was using .ico and .gif. Sad to say that I don't have an answer and it is VERY annoying. I will keep looking, but I'm hesitant to use My.Resources to load images now...

I got the same problem both in vc++2005 and in vc++2008. And, I heppened findan interesting thing that if I type some number in the project name(just like "myproject V1.0")when I create a project, then this problem will never appear. All ofthe things are competely consistent except the project name!

That's a very interesting connection -- and of course equaly as perplexing as the issue itself. For the purposes of recreating the solution, do you mean that you rename the project after the My.Resources failure and the issue goes away? Are there any other steps (i.e. reload the images again, etc.)?

As a follow-up I ended up still loading images into My.Resources (through the Resources tab) but assign the images to teh controls at runtime in teh Load event of the forms. It's been stable without fail but very annoying.

Thanks for the help

I see that if I close the form that crashed.... select "RELEASE" and then "DEBUG" again on the combo from the IDE, open the form again and it works and don't crash If it help you please visit my blog and post a comment good luck

Fabian Silva

http://fabian-silva.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the suggestion Fabian. I will try it as soon as I can get a project's form to fail on me. I have a recent project that got the same issue and so I just set the background image on a button and tried to get the designer to fail but it didn't. I'll let it hang around a while open on my desktop and see if it can be persuaded and I'll try your suggestion once it takes.

Thanks.

Thanks for the advice. I haven't had a chance to try it yet. However, I just had the issue come up again with a project so I might get the chance. Strangely, I get a different error message -- before it was a red (I believe) colored message on a white background. Now I get this very long XML string as one line. Not sure what has changed in my system to have this occur.

I marked it as answer since I believe your story. Hopefully it will help others.