VS2008 - Windows Form Editing Confuses VS

Question

We have a project in our solution that houses a test application with multiple windows forms. Every time I open up a form in the form editor, Visual Studio goes out to lunch, chewing up an entire processor... until I kill the process.

I tried to port over to a new project, thinking something in one of the forms, or the project file was causing the issue, but the new project exhibited the same behavior. In a new solution, though, the forms behave properly.

We did recently convert the solution from 2005 to 2008, but I couldn't find any similar conversion issues.

Anyone else experience something similar?

Answer 1

One of the operations which happens during form load is that form controls in your project which appear on the form are instantiated in the Visual Studio process. Given that they are running in the process it's possible for them to do bad things to Visual Studio like cause it to crash or hang.

You could rule this in or out by opening the form and attaching a debugger to visual studio and seeing if any of your controls are in a timely / infinite loop.