dotnet / dotnet/winforms

Re-occurrence of WinForms designer failing to load

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#10,352 3 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @Shyam-Gupta View on GitHub
area-VSDesigner
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C#
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Description

### Environment

Visual Studio Version 17.8.0

### .NET version

8.0.0

### Did this work in a previous version of Visual Studio and/or previous .NET release?

I have had this issue in the past under .NET 5 & 6 as per https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/issues/6492

However, .NET 8 has been working just fine since converting a project to 8 several weeks ago. I have been working on this project non stop for weeks, until this occurred just now.

### Issue description

Exactly as per closed issue https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/issues/6492

I have been working on this project for weeks, with minor occurrences of behaviour I have witness across multiple machines, and multiple VS versions for years - where jumping between code/designer views, often the designer tab will actually display the code, and closing/reloading the designer view resolves the issue.

However, loading the project this morning I am unable to open the design. VS and the machine were shut down correctly, and nobody else has touched this (all files saved locally).

### Steps to reproduce

Unfortunately I have no idea how to reproduce the issue, as it has just re-occurred seemingly out of nowhere. In my case, it occurred loading the project again this morning, having been working on it for weeks.

I have attempted to generate logs by following https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/issues/6492#issuecomment-1010310024 but absolutely nothing is generated.

I can open a different solution (.NET 6), and the designer loads just fine.

Now, most interesting - I've closing that other solution, jumped back to the problematic solution, and the designer now loads just fine? Even though before I've closed and re-opened the solution, and VS< and the machine several times. Now that he designer has loaded, the log contains many entries.

### Diagnostics

_No response_

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