My question is on how custom controls should be updated.
I downloaded this owner drawn custom control, which I built, then copied the DLL to the Debug folder of the project and loaded it into the toolbox from there.
I decided to use this button on another project. I was mildly surprised to see the control was still in the toolbox but it seemed to work just fine. I decided to change this custom button's behavior. The button in the toolbox referenced the old version number. So I deleted it and loaded the newly rebuilt DLL.
Now come the problems. The first application--the one where the DLL was added to the toolbox from--still runs okay, but the second application is throwing errors, saying, Type 'CButtonLib.CButton' is not defined. When I add the button to a form, it appears okay. I can change its properties and it shows up in the code windows and in the object browser. But as soon as I try to run it and it throws the errors, it no longer appears in the object browser. References in the code window lose their intellisense.
Things I've tried include:
Copying the DLL to the project's debug and release folders and loading them into the toolbox from there.
Removing it from the toolbox altogether and just adding a reference then copying and pasting a button directly from the first project.
Copying in a form with a CButton on it from the first project.
Scouring the internet for answers
Swearing at the computer.
Nothing seems to work and I've now spent over a day trying to solve this.
I never did get to the bottom of this. In the end I simply had to recreate the entire custom control project using a different name. I suspect the way I added the original project to the toolbox of a different program – as opposed to adding it within the test project it came with – may have had something to do with it, but that's just a guess. Anyway, I can amend and update the new control without problem now, so all's well that ends well. :-)
Related
When trying to open the form deisgn it says values cannot be null. (Parameter 'baseName'). I still can run the system without error. Dont know how to fix it and have to change some gui design. Help me its for my school tnx
I had this problem this morning and a few hours later I decided to just start over and copy the code from the old project to the new empty project. Everything is working in the new copy of the project. I copied from old to new by drag-n-drop. I copied all the UserControls before I copied anything that uses them, and built, then copied over the remaining things, and went through all the errors caused by the change in name of the top-level Namespace.
(All of the Namespace errors were in the .Designer.vb files. I have posted elsewhere "never edit those files by hand unless you know what you are doing." This case was one of the rare exceptions.)
I had the OP's problem that when I tried to open a Form in the designer, I got the message
Value cannot be null. (Parameter 'baseName')
It didn't matter if I tried to open the Form in Solution Explorer or by pressing Shift-F7 in the Form's code window. However, sometimes Shift-F7 resulted in a wait cursor followed by silence - no error message.
Like the OP, the project did run without errors (well, same bugs as before but you know what I mean).
Another symptom: If I launched VS and tried to open the Form designer before Intellisense was initialized, instead of the other error, the window that should show the layout of the Form showed this instead:
File path: full path of the file I was trying to open
Frame GUID: 2c01570-c72c-11d0-88c3-00ac0c9110049
Frame mode: VSFM_MdiChild
Error code: 0x80131500
There are no MDI containers in my project. It's a reference to VS 2019.
The same error occurred in every Form and UserControl in the project.
The same error occurred in any new Form or UserControl that I added to the project.
The error did NOT OCCUR in any and all other projects built in VS 2019 with a target of .Net 5.0
The error DID OCCUR with the same project on another machine running a clean install of a later version of VS 2019.
Attempts to Clean Solution or Clean Project failed, with a generic error message, it was something like "Clean Project failed."
Nothing about these problems appeared in any event logs.
Every time the problem happened, when I shut VS, one process was left running (per TM).
Here are some other things I did to try to suss it:
Ran a repair install on VS 2019 and reboot.
Opened each and every VS-generated file in another project and compared them line-for-line (most are text) against the corresponding files in the broken project. No data-independent differences.
Searched exhaustively with 3 search engines and many terms for someone else that posted about this error. This is the only post I found.
Deleted, renamed, or moved files that are automatically generated by VS, including some Json files, XMLs, and caches.
What I did not try:
Roll back the code to the most recent commit.
Uninstall VS 2019 completely, reboot, install VS 2019 as if an initial installation.
Just had the same experience. I took me a while before I got everything to work again, but the clue in my case was that I had added a new item to my project, and for some reason I had managed to delete the file name in the process so the only thing left was 3 new files with only the extensions .resx, .cs and .Designer.cs
I quickly deleted the ".cs" file but forgot the rest.
Suddenly I was unable to open my main form in the designer - and the “Value cannot be null. (Parameter 'baseName')” started to appear. It was only affecting my main form.
I tried almost everything described above except the reinstalling part.
But then I deleted ".Designer.cs" and ".resx" from within visual studio (Solution Explorer), and then the problem went away.
I started getting this error after using a hack to support generics forms (e.g. MyForm). The designer generated a file:
MyForm.resx
which worked for design time (even with the form being generic) but crashed at runtime. My hack was to rename the .resx file:
MyForm`1.resx
However that is when the Designer stopped working. It stopped working for ALL forms/user controls in entire solution (not just the generic I was experimenting with). I assume there is some kind of process that crawls all the resx files whenever you open any Designer and that is the source of the Exception.
I was able to work around the issue by:
Renaming the resx back to its non generic title (i.e. MyForm.resx)
Restarting visual studio.
So, since updating, the gui randomly hangs editing a xib file. The scenario goes like this:
click an object - i.e, array controller
expand a parameter, Filter Predicate here
Select target object in pull down
try to enter model key path - HANG
In different xib files, the hang comes when trying to enter the model key path textfield. I've also seen errors citing bogus fields like 'Hidden3' for some attribute bindings - only workaround was to remove them.
Has anyone ventured to editing the xml directly, but I guess I can do that in code :-(
Well, I know this is an old question, but I found an answer.
My situation was similar to the one described above: Xcode hanging whenever I edited the key path of any binding in Xcode 8.1. Nothing described here or elsewhere worked.
However, what did work was to edit the storyboard outside of the actual Xcode project: open the offending StoryBoard by itself, do not access it through the project.
This appears consistent with a Sample/Spindump through the Activity Monitor when Xcode hung that showed functions that appeared related to auto-completion/edition. Unchecking auto-completion did not work though (in Prefs).
I have a sliverlight web application in VS2010. I have several projects in the solution,
one of them I use as a library of dialog boxes and other screens used in the other projects.
I edited one such dialog box, a child window, and added an extra row to the layout grid and
a combobox to the row. I rebuilt the soluition and my change appears in one sub-project but
not in another.
For the purpose of discussion here are the module names:
Manage - uses the child window 'add' in SilverlightClassLibrary2
Policy - uses the child window 'add' in SilverlightClassLibrary2
SilverlightClassLibrary2 - contains the child window 'add'
Note that this has been working for years until now.
My first indication of a problem was I could not hit a break point in Manage, it would
say no symbols loaded. I checked the references to SilverlightClassLibrary2 and they point
to the correct dll in the debug folder. A full recompile changes the date-time stamp of
the SilverlightClassLibrary2.dll everywhere. I deleted all dll's manually and re-compiled
and still manage has the old version of 'add' and policy has the new changes.
I'm at a loss as to where manage is getting an old copy of SilverlightClassLibrary2.dll
It is obviously looking somewhere else, this would also explain why the symbols are not
being loaded. It's not looking in the release folder, even so I re-compiled in release mode
to make sure it too had the changes. I deleted and re-added the reference (a project reference) to the SilverlightclassLibrary2.dll, still the same problem.
So where can I look to figure out what is going on with this?
SOLVED:
ahhhhhhh...it was chrome's browser cache that was giving me the old code.
As for the breakpoint issue, solved by using IE8 (i'm on xp) instead of chrome.
ahhhhhh...it was chrome's browser cache. I cleared it and now I see my changes.
Still can't hit the break point in chrome (no symbols loaded for some modules) even after clearing chrome's cache, but the breakpoints do work in IE8.
There was a suggestion to look at debug -> windows -> modules and locate the errant module and manually load symbols - but the module I want is not listed even though I navigate my app to the page in question. I use a line like this:
dim cw as new SilverlightClassLibrary2.Add
to create the child window, so perhaps this does not show up in the module list when using chrome? In IE8 the SilverlightClassLibrary2 module does show up in the list. strange.
We have a VB project that loads a reference to a .Net dll (which we also make). Both projects are being simultaneously developed.
When we add new classes to the referenced dll, the main project normally fails to notice the changes.
That is, if we added a new class Bar to the Foo dll, we should be able to type "Foo." and have Bar listed in the intellisense dropdown. It's never there.
Removing the reference and then adding it back in again sometimes fixes the problem. Sometimes we have been able to just manually type Bar in and then rebuild without errors.
It seems to me that there should be some way to tell Visual Studio to reload the referenced project because it has changed. Actually, I think VS should notice the change itself, but failing that, we need a simple way to force a reload.
Any suggestions?
Edit: It is VS2005 and we are referencing output assemblies (the dll)
I had this problem once. Put both projects into a single solution. Right-click on the Solution in the Solution Explorer, and set the build order. Make the main project dependent on the .DLL. Now, when you rebuild the solution, the .DLL gets built first, and the main project will see all the changes.
EDIT: Also, reference the .DLL as a Project instead of selecting Browse when choosing a reference. Then, the changes should be immediately recognized by the main project without rebuilding.
Failed to create component 'User Control 1'. the error message follows:
'System.NullReferenceException : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at System.ComponentModel.ReflectPropertyDescriptor.SetValue(Object Component, Object Value)
.............. etc..........
What should I do to fix this error?
When a User Control won't load into the Visual Studio designer here is what you need to do. These instruction are for vb.net project but c# should be similar. Also, before doing this close all open windows (or at least the source and designer files of the control you are working on.)
One last thing. The FIRST thing you should do is ensure that restarting visual studio doesn't fix the problem. If not you can try the steps that follow. These instructions assume that the errant user controls are in control library project in visual studio. If not you should be able to adjust the directions a bit to get it to work but it is much easier when the control is in its own project.
Do the following:
Make the control library your startup project.
Open the properties for the control library project and click on the debug tab.
Under Start Action click the Start external program option and browse to the Visual Studio executable.
NOTE: what this means is that when you run your solution it will fire up another instance of Visual Studio instead of actually running your solution. The First Instance of Visual Studion (INSTANCE_1) will "host" a second instance of visual studio (INSTANCE_2) when you run it.
Run your solution. INSTANCE_2 will load.
Switch back to INSTANCE_1.
In INSTANCE_1 hit CTRL-ALT-E. This will open up the exceptions dialog box. Check On the THROWN column checkbox next to Common Language Runtime Exceptions.
NOTE: This will ensure that INSTANCE_1 will BREAK at ANY runtime error even if it is hit in a try block.
Switch to INSTANCE_2. In Solution Explorer double-click to open the errant user control.
You should find that INSTANCE_1 OF Visual Studio should have stopped at the line of code that caused the designer to not load the control. Fix the code (which usually means testing for IsNot Nothing before references an object properties...but could mean other things.)
Also, sometimes I find that the control WILL load in INSTANCE_2 instead of breaking on an error in INSTANCE_1. In that case just stop debugging...close INSTANCE_2. Save/Restart INSTANCE_1 and your problem will often have gone away.
The lesson is this. User Control MUST be able to load/reference all objects and their members in order to load it into the designer. So for User Controls that will be placed onto other containers I will usually design events to notify the parent rather than trying to push objects into the child control.
Hope this helps for future reference on this old question.
Seth
Instead of the error occurring when you open up a form for editing, it sounds like this is occurring when you are already editing a form and adding new user controls. A CodeProject article that was previously mentioned shows what to do in the case of a form not loading correctly, rather than a specific user control.
Does your user control have any properties that map to custom objects (i.e. not Integer or String)? If so, the Form Designer will attempt to load your properties into the Property Editor. If showing the properties generates an error, the Form Designer will show that to you. I think this is what is happening with your user control.
If you could edit the question and add more information about the nature of the error (more of the error text), it would assist others in helping you better. Alternatively, see if you can find the property that might be causing the error (e.g. whether any property relies on a non-null value being set). You can also take a look at this MSDN article for tips on how to limit the control for just run-time.
Thanks, Seth, for this post! Your solution helped me nail down the error. The only thing I would add to this is that when "INSTANCE_2" loads, you may need to actually load the project file in INSTANCE_2. I needed to because I wasn't dealing with a control library, but instead had custom User Controls defined in the same project that the forms were located in. Once I loaded the project in INSTANCE_2, I opened the erring form and that caused INSTANCE_1 to pop up to the line of offending code in the User Control.
I have found that this error often occurs when control dlls are not building properly. 95% of the time this is remedied by simply restarting Visual Studio.