"How to avoid the WSOD" (White Screen of Darn)

The Code Project - How to Avoid WSOD’s in Visual Studio 2005 Designer

"This article explains how to tackle one of the most dreadful Windows Forms developers encounter during their daily work - WSDO’s.

Background
The term WSOD (White Screen of Darn) was set by Microsoft employees in an MSDN blog.  
Using the code
Imagine the following scenario. One morning you arrive at your workplace, turn your monitor on, and then try to open a form in your application, that builds and runs perfectly well, and instead of seeing your handcrafted form, you see a big frightening screen with the following title in red, and a big X near it:

One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while others may require code changes
..."

Very nice.

The WSOD (and how much I don’t like seeing it) is one of the things I commented on in my recent VS2005 Engineer to Engineer survey (You Have the POWER! (To help drive the future Visual Studio)).

This Code Project post is a nice overview of the problem and some ways to fix it when you run into it.

Technorati Tags: WSOD, Visual Studio 2005