Visual Studio.NET Blank Property Browser Bug

Introduction

Visual Studio .NET Blank Property Browser Bug

What is blank property browser bug?

In Visual Studio .NET 2003 version, IDE shows properties of selected object/file in Property Browser window. Sometimes this window only shows properties of UI elements and does not show anything for HTML elements or installer file settings etc. This misbehaviour starts after creating some installer project in Visual Studio.

The following figure shows how Property Browser should show settings of a project.

And following figure shows the blank Property Browser, which occurs in Visual Studio .NET 2003 version.

So far I do not know why it occurs, but I found out way to resolve by hook or crook. I switched user and saw that it was working well when I started Visual Studio .NET first time, but from next subsequent types it started showing blank Property Browser. Then I understood that it does store something to user's data registry or directory which affects this behaviour.

Then I deleted registry / files one by one to find out, when Visual Studio shows Property Browser properly. So after number of experiments I found out that deleting C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1 makes Visual Studio .NET work properly. I mean to say that if we delete entire folder of Visual Studio settings folder then Property Browser works perfectly. But this folder is created every time when Visual Studio exits.

So I created Visual Studio .NET Add-in which works with Visual Studio and when Visual Studio exits it automatically deletes the settings folder which makes Property Browser work efficiently all time. However this may not store your personalized setting of change of UI elements of Studio.

The Add-in is available for download for FREE of charge here.

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