Event screen randomly displays and disappears in VS 2008

Question

I know this minor annoyance .. but it's still annoying, and it puzzles me .. About 3 months ago I used VS 2008, and when I switched to the Properties tab, there was a little lightning for events (in development mode). Then he suddenly left .. after about a week I found that if I didn’t have the “sticky” properties tab, then the events would be there, but not when it was stripped.

This morning it all worked great. Today I went to add an event, and suddenly there is no longer a small lightning icon. I do not see any shutdown option, and it disappeared if I did not reconfigure. Even without restarting VS. And I tried restarting VS to no avail.

What am I missing here? Is this a very annoying bug in VS 2008 (its current) or am I missing any configuration?

Update . I attach generosity to this question to find out if I can get something more useful. In short, it looks like the event tab will appear and disappear in a month or two cycles. And this is not a context issue. I have a cursor inside a button, for example, and I can edit all the properties of the button, but the events tab does not appear ... Even more confusing is that it worked a few weeks ago again.

alt text http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/6301/eventsx.png

Answer 1

The Events tab is managed by the designer. If the designer is active or the original view is active, but the designer is synchronized, you should see the Events tab. After changing the contents of the source code, the designer will not be synchronized and will no longer display the Events tab. You can open the Events tab again by switching to the designer and vice versa.

You can find out if the designer is synchronized by looking at the type information in the Property Grid. If it is synchronized, you will see the full name of the .NET class (for example, for a button, you will see something like Button1 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button), and if it is not sync, you will see an XML element (for example, Button1 <BUTTON>). In addition, the list of properties available for the element and how they are located in the Property Grid will change depending on whether it uses type properties or schema properties.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2008 has a known bug where it will not display an event button for ASP.Net controls in asp:Table control. Workaround from Microsoft:

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

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If this is not the case, try the following troubleshooting steps:

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

• If this does not help: does it happen in other projects / solutions or only in one? Does this happen when loading the same project / solution on another computer with a similar setting?

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

  If this happens in the same solution on other computers, but not in different solutions, the solution / project / designer files may be damaged. Limit this to one of them and recreate the criminal (this may be a mistake similar to the previous one, in which case all you can do is send a bug report and wait ...)

  If neither one nor the other ... well, something supernatural happens!

Answer 3

Where is your properties button? This is also not enough. They may be related. And why do you have a <BUTTON> ? Mine is not like yours.

Here's what my properties panel looks like (VS 2008):

alt text http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/2365/whereisyourpropertiesbu.png

Edit:

Have you tried the Reset Layout Menu from the File-> Window menu:

alt text http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/7241/resetwindowlayout.png

In class diagram mode on my computer, I don’t get the Properties button or the Events button:

alt text http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/1455/classdiagrammode.png

It seems that only the property buttons and the Events button are in development mode:

alt text http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/8011/designmode.png

You can also right-click a menu here:

alt text http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/3867/rightclickmenu.png

Answer 4

This may seem crazy, but if you use a Microsoft wireless mouse. Try disabling the key ... Does it reappear? Now you can plug it back in and everything will be fine until you restart VS.

I had this problem. If the properties window also disappears.

I was embarrassed, and it took me months. As for the fix, I did not find a permanent one. But there were rumors that this was typical of Microsoft mice (and keyboards are also possible)

Answer 5

I think the lightning bolt icon is contextual - if you do not have something with the selected events, you will not see it.

Answer 6

I do not know why this problem arises, but the solution is just two clicks away.

The reason you don’t see the events tab is because there are two entries in the drop-down list (marked with a question mark in your picture). One will be of type ASP: net button, and the other, as can be seen in the picture, just click the button.

The solution is to select another btnLocate button from the drop-down list. There you have full access to events.