Events tab randomly appears and disappears in VS 2008

Question

I know it's a minor annoyance.. but it's still an annoyance and it baffles me.. About 3 months ago I was using VS 2008 and when I went to the "Properties" tab there was the little lightning bolt for events(in design mode). Then it suddenly went away.. about a week later I discovered that if I didn't have the properties tab "stickied", then the events thing would be there, but not when its stickied.

This morning all of this was working fine. Now today I went to add an event, and suddenly the little lightning bolt icon is no longer there. I can not see any option disabling and it disappeared without me doing any reconfiguration.. Even without restarting VS. And I have tried restarting VS to no avail..

What am I missing here? Is this a highly annoying bug in VS 2008(its up to date) or am I missing some configuration?

Update I'm attaching a bounty to this question to see if I can get something a bit more helpful. In short it seems like the event tab will appear and disappear on a month or two cycle. And it's not a context problem. I have my cursor inside of a button for instance and I can edit all the properties of the button yet the events tab does not show up... More confusing is that yet again, this was working a few weeks ago

Answer 1

I think that lightning bolt icon is contextual- if you don't have something with events selected, you won't see it.

Answer 2

There is a known bug in Visual Studio 2008 where it will not display the events button for ASP.Net controls within an asp:Table control. The workaround from Microsoft:

Use regular <table> and <tr> and <td> tags and mark them as runat="server". This will give you the ability to modify them in code and the designer will give you acccess to the properties and events on the button.

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If this is not the case for you, try these troubleshooting steps:

1. Try deleting the .user and .suo files (located in the same folder as your solution).

2. If that does not help: Does this occur in other projects/solutions, or just the one? Does it occur when loading the same project/solution on a different computer with a similar setup?

   If it always happens on your computer but not others, it may be that some important file is corrupt - try reinstalling VS (and perhaps, unfortunately, even Windows).

   If it happens in the same solution on other computers, but not in different solutions, the solution/project/designer files may be corrupt. Narrow it down to one of those, and recreate the offender (it may also be a bug similar to the one above, in which case all you can do is submit a bug report and wait...)

   If neither or both... well, something super-screwy is going on!

Answer 3

Where is your Properties Button? That's missing too on yours. They might be related. And why do you have <BUTTON>? Mine doesn't look quite like yours.

Here what my Properties pane looks like (VS 2008):

Edit:

Did you try Reset Menu Layout from the File->Window menu:

In Class Diagram mode on my computer I don't get the Properties Button or the Events Button:

I only seem to get the Properties Button and the Events Button from within Design Mode:

There's also this right-click menu:

Answer 4

This might sound crazy but if you are using a Microsoft wireless mouse. Try unplugging the dongle... Does it re-appear? You can now plug it back in and it will be fine until you restart VS.

I had that very problem. Had my properties window disappearing too.

Was driving me crazy and took me months to work out. As for a fix, I didn't find a permanent one. But there were rumours it was specific to Microsoft mice (and keyboards? too maybe)

Answer 5

I don't know why this problem occurs, but the solution is just 2 clicks away.

The reason for not seeing the event tab is because there 2 multiple entries in the dropdownlist (marked with a questionmark in your picture). The one will be from the type ASP:net button and the other is , as seen on the picture, just button.

The solution is to pick the other btnLocate button from the drop down list. There you have full access to the events.