Microsoft's thorn in my side

I'm a mommy at home, but the majority of my waking hours are spent at work wrestling Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to my will. I am a software engineer that develops Windows GUI (graphics user interface) for biotech instrumentation. When we finally release our product, I'll put a screen shot up of my awesome program. I absolutely love the C# programming language (that's sharp and not pound as my buddy Tom used to think) and most of the time I'm in geek heaven while I'm at work. The biggest annoyance that VS 2005 brings is that dreaded designer error message above. So if you have never seen this message in your life (and never will), you can skip the rest of this post. For my geeky friends (you know who you are), read on.

I can be working happily on a form, shut down for the night, and come back the next morning and see the message on the very same form. I could be working on a form and switch to a different form in the same assembly using the same controls and get the error. The purported "rebuilding your project" NEVER helps. Sometimes, you can clean and rebuild and it will go away (why rebuild doesn't perform a clean, I don't know). Sometimes you need to clean, close Visual Studio, open it, build and then it will go away. Once, I wasted a good half day when none of these tricks worked. I was googling, asking other programmers, and trying things out myself. I finally deleted my entire source tree, did a fresh get, and the error message finally went away. Then I went on the hunt for the lingering corrupt(?) file(s) that aren't deleted with a clean which were causing the error message. It turned out to be the [solution].suo file. So when all else fails, clean, close Visual Studio and deleted the .suo file. The problem is that you never know when you have to resort to the full treatment as many times the other tricks do work. Hopefully Micro$oft will fix this issue, which is getting all sort of flames on usenet. I never did see my particular solution posted, but it definitely works for me (I'm too shy to jump into that fire).

I can't resist this last graphic, although I need to be careful about badmouthing Microsoft, programming Windows is my bread and butter!!