Copying Over Forms in VS2022

Todd Lerew 60

Hello everyone.

I am having an issue in VS2022 that I have never had before and do not know why.

I work for a company and I have created our ERP System in Visual Studio. We constantly add things or make changes to the programs, forms, reports, etc. There are three different people who work on this project, but I am the lead. We recently upgraded from VS2008 to VS2022, programming in Visual Basic. When one of us three makes changes to any windows forms, they copy the changed forms over to a shared folder that I copy to my project directory and empty the folder. I do all the updates/publishes on my copy of VS2022, so that data does not get overwritten. We have been doing this for a while with no issues. The last time I copied forms over and included them in my project, they did not come over as windows forms. When I include them in my project, in solution explorer, you can see all three files for a windows form, by the icon next to the form name in solution explorer isn't an form icon, it says "VB". If you click on it, all you see is the code. You cannot see "Form View". So I cannot add or edit any controls on the form itself. I have deleted the form, got an old one from a previous backup, and the same thing. This has never happened before - we have been copying and consolidating our project like this for years. Anyone have any idea why it is doing this? I can't even re-copy my original form back into my project, because it does the same thing.

I am very confused.

Thanks,

Todd

Todd Lerew 60 Reputation points

2024-11-20T18:19:04.1333333+00:00

Attached is a screen shot of my open project in VS2022, showing the solution explorer, and how the Form shows.

VB Example.pdf
Tianyu Sun-MSFT 31,411 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-11-21T03:13:26.69+00:00
Hi @Todd Lerew ,

Thank you for sharing us the screenshot.

May I firstly confirm several things with you:

If you try to create a new Form.vb file and include it to your project, will this newly created, simple form be displayed correctly?

There are three methods to include/add the form to the project, do you try all of them? And what’s the result?

    (i) Right-click the form file > Include In Project.

   (ii) Right-click the project > Add > Existing Item… > browse, find and select the form > Add.

   (iii) Right-click the project > Add > New Item > select and create a new Form file > modify(copy the code from your form file -> paste the code to the newly created form file) the file.

Are you using the latest version of Visual Studio 2022(17.12.1)?

Does manually removing the bin, obj and the hidden .vs folder, and then rebuilding(Build > Rebuild Solution) the project work?

Please kindly have a try to repair VS as well. From VS Installer > More > Repair(this takes some time).

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Copying Over Forms in VS2022

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