>Visual Studio suddenly refuses to show forms in the designer

>

Short story:

Totally wierd.  One day VSNet of my colleague refused to open a form.

The solution was to run “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” /ResetSkipPkgs

Long story:

VSNet 2008 suddenly refused to open a form in a VBNet project with the message

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Microsoft Visual Studio
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There is no editor available for ‘C:\Documents and Settings\myusername\Local Settings\Application Data\Temporary Projects\WindowsApplication1\Form1.vb’.
Make sure the application for the file type (.vb) is installed.
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OK  
—————————

(How to copy error message dialogues.)

Googling didn’t give much.

Repair did nothing.  It stopped after a “…has encountered a problem…” with Ok as only choice.
Uninstallation din’t work; the same error as above.
Uninstalled through a tool found here.  Reinstalled VSNet2008 and Service Pack 1.  The “total uninstallation” was a fraud, the old projects still populated the MRU list :-(  And the problem remained.

My colleague created a new winform project in C# where the problem was the same but the error message different.

—————————
Microsoft Visual Studio
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Project ‘WindowsFormsApplication1’ could not be opened because the Microsoft Visual C# 2008 compiler could not be created. QueryService for ‘{74946829-37A0-11D2-A273-00C04F8EF4FF}’ failed.
—————————
OK  
—————————

This gave us more Google fodder to find more switches here.

After running “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” /ResetSkipPkgs the sky was sunny again.

This took the better part of a day.

Why didn’t uninstall all remove everything.  Who do Microsoft think they are?  Adobe?

(the dialogue dumps above were easily copied with ctrl-c. read more here)

One Response to “>Visual Studio suddenly refuses to show forms in the designer”

  1. David Guzman says:

    Thank you very much, I spent 2 weeks trying to resolve this problem, and you help me.

    Thanks again..!

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