Thursday, December 21, 2006

I've recently discovered a change in the SP1 for Visual Studio 2005 IDE. Below are solutions I found:

Problem -
When using Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers IDE with Visual Studio SP1 and ASP.NET AJAX RC installed, the Properties window becomes empty (completely blank) when viewing an ASP.NET control or any <tag> in Source View for a web app. Everything works fine when viewed in Design View. I've only recently installed SP1 & AJAX RC. There are no "extras/add-ons" installed for VS2005 IDE as I've just reinstalled Window Server 2003 EE last week. Just curious to know if there's a "user error" or a "ID10T error" (on my behalf) or if it's just a bug in the SP1 or AJAX RC installations. Note: Before the SP1 & AJAX RC install, everything worked fine as before and am not sure if it's SP1 or AJAX RC causing the issue as I've installed both around the same time before bug was discovered. Just let me know what's going on...

Solution -
I found the answer to my problem just in time from ScottGu's blog sent via RSS. When installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, the Properties window gets disabled by default do to developer feedback. Apparently, more developers considered the Properties window a major annoyance (which I strongly disagree). You'll have to re-enable by "simply open the Tools->Options menu item and click the "Enable Property Grid in Source View" configuration option within the Text Editor->Html->Miscellaneous category". Hope this helps and thanks for the tip Scott...

I know there will be quite a few developers that may need this. The original post and be found here.