I'm fairly new to C#, I'm following along with an online tutorial, and I was working on building some forms when I noticed that the Visual Studio 2019 C# Form Designer was acting strangely. First every once in a while I would place an element on the form and then I wouldn't be able to select any other element, it would be stuck on that one element and clicking at all would cause the selected element to resize, rather than move like I would expect. That was annoying, but I was able to close the design window, and reopen it and it worked okay again, until it happened again usually after placing 2 or 3 elements with no issue.
But then a new problem started happening, where the place that I click on the design is offset to the left and down. So In order to select an element I have to move to the right and up, in order to be able to select the element I want to edit. The red rectangle in the picture below shows the spot where I would have to click in order to select the "Create Tournament" label. This is much worse than the first problem, and closing and reopening the design window doesn't help, nor does restarting Visual Studio or even resetting my computer. This is also happening across all of my forms. I was wondering if anyone knew what was going on or how I could fix this. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
Related
My professor took off points on an assignment for “leaving Empty Code Templates throughout my submission”. I’ve included a picture of what he was referring to. If anyone could help explain how to remove these?
I tried deleting them, hoping it would be all fine but I just get an error when I go back to my form.
As mentioned by Blue in a comment
Click on the associated controls in the designer view, and click the lightning bolt to view events. Delete them from there and you should be free to delete the leftover code.
It is a bad idea to edit event code signatures outside the designer.
Make sure you open the designer often or have frequent version control to avoid file corruption.
a friend just fixed it for me, she said: “ just delete what you want to delete and when u go back to ur program and it has that error click on “go to code” on the top right corner and delete the part that’s underlined in red”
Is it possible to get the window tabs in a vertical row? That way I can navigate to way more windows directly, using the mouse. I know there are paid tools available, but using them is not an option in my working environment...
I fear this will cost me some precious evenings, making an add-in myself. Can anyone give me a head start? What are the best starting points for making a SSMS add-in like this? Or even better, is there an existing project I can use as a starting point?
If you don't want to spend money on Tab Studio, then you can still have your tabs vertically.
Just click on the 'Solutions Explorer' on the top tool bars (or ctrl+alt+L), then drag the appearing window, and nest it into the left of the management studio window, the same way as Object Explorer is there by default.
It will list all the files in the 'project' vertically, which will happens to be all your tabs on the top.
When using Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition my cursor frequently disappears when I perform the Ctrl+. shortcut to resolve missing dependencies. For example, if I am creating a new Entity Framework entity and want to add the [Required] attribute to one of my properties:
Type [Required]. The attribute gets a red squiggly underline.
Click Ctrl+. to bring up the suggested imports
Select the using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations option using the arrow keys
Press Enter to select it and import the using statement
Sometimes I can continue coding without any issues. But most of the time my cursor disappears and I have to click back on the code editor to get my cursor back.
It happens to me on several different computers using Windows 7, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10. I've tried resetting my VS2015 configurations to default, but it didn't seem to help. The only other thing I can think of that might be worth mentioning is that I'm use the Dark theme.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a setting change so that the editor keeps focus, or a keyboard shortcut to get the cursor back? It isn't the end of the world to use the mouse but I never had to do it in 2013 so it is slightly annoying.
I ran into the same issue, and found that if I went to my mouse properties and changed the default pointer for Text Select to one with white in it, I didn't lose the pointer in the editor. I don't know if this'll solve your issue, but it helped with mine.
I've had this problem as well, for me it seemed to be a glitch with the touch screen capabilities on my laptop. The cursor would disappear when using the track pad and moving into the work area in VS, and come back when I moved it outside to like solution explorer or similar.
Easily resolved by tapping the screen.
I had the missing cursor issue in VS 2015 Community Edition and it turns out the culprit was the Gotomeeting client software running on my desktop. I was accessing VS 2015 in an RDP session and as long as Gotomeeting was running on the desktop running the RDP client my VS 2015 cursor in the RDP session would disappear randomly.
I had the problem that the blinking cursor completely disappeared in Visual Studio 2017 (and probably other places as well). Found this old block post, that helped me:
I found the cause of the problem. I had also noticed that I did not have a text cursor (caret) in programs like Windows Live Mail. Somehow my caret size got changed to zero. The solution in Windows 7 was to go to Control Panel, Ease of Access Center, Make the computer easier to see, and under Make things on the screen easier to see set the thickness of the blinking cursor to 1 (mine was displaying a blank field). After applying the change, the text cursor displayed fine in Visual Studio Editor and Windows Live Mail.
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/c7ba185e-1840-4649-984e-c12d5525baa2/cursor-not-visible-in-visual-studio-editor?forum=vseditor
None of the (many across web) posted solutions for the disappearing cursor worked. I found a solution that works for me go to:
Tools/Options/Environment/General/Window layout
there are 2 radio buttons:
Tabbed Documents
Multiple Documents
You must select one or the other. I switched to Multiple Documents and this solved the problem.
Details: this problem manifests when changing the focus to any other open window/application via Alt+Tab. On return, Vis Studio has no cursor visible. Ctrl+Tab is a sorry workaround, yet effective. But this fix is totally sat for me.
Try pressing the "insert" button. You might need to hold down the "fn" key for this.
I'm having a persistent problem with my VS2010. After working for a while, the display will start to glitch out. The code all shows as black-on-black (I use a dark background because it's easier on the eyes, but even when I switched to the default, it just makes the text white-on-white instead.) All tooltip hovers appear in the upper-left corner of the screen instead of where they're supposed to. If you select text, the code that gets selected is nowhere near where you clicked the mouse. (Not that you can read the text anyhow since it's the same color as the background.) And none of the dockable panels will appear or if they do they're all glitched out as well. The only solution seems to be closing the program and restarting it. I've been using this copy of VS2010 for years without issue, and my other projects don't seem to have any problems. This one is C#, uses a lot of Windows Forms (not WPF), has some customized Controls, but otherwise isn't all that unusual. I have the following extensions:
CodeMaid
CSharpIntellisensePresenter
InheritanceMargin
ProductivityPowerTools
Tunnel Vision Labs Output Window Services
WatermarkTextBox Control
Some of these are recently installed so they may be the culprits. Has anyone had any display problems with any of these extensions? I can live without most of them, but I'm not sure if it'll make a difference. There's no easy way to test it either, as the glitch only shows up every couple of hours or so.
When i open a form in visual studio 2005 (c#) the designer automaticaly resize the form and move/resize controls without touching the designer at all. The source file is changed and when i close the designer i'm asked to save the *.cs file.
I tried to look into visual studio options without any success.
any ideas?
visual studio setup or something?
thanks,
Tal
I have been working on this problem for most of today and found some interesting things: The main source of the problem seems to be relying on anchoring. If I use docking to position my controls, instead of anchoring, my problems seem to go away. I found a couple of blog posts from 2003(!), which detail how you might use docking instead of anchoring, and explain how anchoring can break the Windows Forms designer. It seems like this problem might be over 7 years old!
Here are the posts:
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2003/09/24/28984.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2003/10/17/32407.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2003/10/23/33181.aspx
This is due to AutoScaleMode-property. Your forms have probably been designed with a different DPI or Font settings than you have now in Windows display settings. AutoScaleMode-property has 4 different possible values : Dpi, Font, Inherit or None. In Dpi or Font mode, your forms and controls will be automatically resized depending on windows display settings.
So, set the AutoScaleMode-property to None in all your forms and controls and they won't be automatically resized anymore. Try to design your forms in order to let sufficient space in every controls so that text will fit even if text size is set to 125%.
I found a work around.
not sure what happens behind but i changed my display properties. and it works fine.
here is the sequence: display propertis->settings tab->advance.
in the the advance dialog i changed the "DPI Settings" from Large (120dpi) to Normal (96 dpi)
Had the same problem with controls anchored top, left and right within complex TabControls. The visual studio forms designer was increasing the width of all nested controls each time I would open the form.
I found a simple workaround thanks to this post. I simply added a panel to each tab and set their dock property to fill. All existing controls within the tabs were moved inside those panels. This works, even if the controls are anchored top, left and right.
Works at least for Visual Studio 2013 and 2015.
This is one you should live with. Even in VS2008 such things happen from time to time. It is mostly depends on form content (controls, positions, etc), and there is no option in VS to disable such behavior.
When you open your form in designer, vs runtime rebuilds visual appearance from code behind. And sometimes it made changes at this moment. Also when you are simply adding one control to form, designer fully rebuilds codebehind and resource files. This is well known issue, and seems that MS won't fix it, because they move in WPF direction.
So several points to simplify your life:
Move to VS2008, designer were more consistent, but still shuffle controls in .designer.cs file
Place your code in one of the source repositories, so if you accidentally saved such form, you can restore it from repositary.
Setting the form Min and Max size settings to the current size was a good work around for me. This prevented VS from resizing it.
I had a trivial form with few controls on it, where the OK and Cancel at the bottom were being shifted up as soon as the form was opened in the VS2013 designer. The same behaviour was observed in VS2015.
The accepted answer here of DPI did not solve the issue for me, nor were there any issues on the size of the form/padding/margins.
Removing the controls that are shifted and adding them back into the form solved the problem for me, as suggested by ptutt here:
Visual Studio designer moving controls and adding grid columns when form is opened
While I appreciate ryantum's suggestion and links of using docking [with panels], as also referred to in the link above with Roland's blog post here https://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/28984, with something so trivial I'd rather just make it go away with removing/adding back in.
I found locking the controls from the format menu was a simple and effective solution. VS2013
I had this problem with VS 2015.
I used dock panels with the controls that moved unexpectedly as their childs.
By default the controls will be aligned to the left, but you can change the orientation.
My buttons stopped moving.
I had this issue, too. Every time I opened the designer, every box with anchor "right" was moved about 20 Pixels to the left. Additionally, the bottom of every box with anchor "left" was about 200 pixels outside the form.
This form has many controls and should not shrink on smaller displays, so it was set to autoscroll, the form itself was smaller in the designer than the shown minimum size (historically...). I just set the size to the minimum size so that no scroll bars appeared in the designer and the anchors worked as expected without screwing up the postitions.
I read the first post from ryantm's answer which led me to the solution. Apparently it has something to do with the order .Net executes events such as setting the size of a form.