Now when we’re all anticipating Visual Studio 2005, it’s time for me to crank out a tip regarding Visual Studio 2003.

If it’s a tip concerning you depends on whether or not you’re among the unfortunate ones like me, who sometimes displeases VS in such a way that it decides to teach me a lesson – by turning most of my Forms and UserControls into regular classes so that they cannot be designed anymore!

If this hasn’t happened to you – you’re among the fortunate ones and I congratulate you. (God’s little pet, right!?)

When this disaster has struck me before I have either resumed from a backup and just moved the latest changed files back into my project, or I have tediously begun to copy the text of each damaged file to the clipboard and then deleted the file from the project, then adding a new one with the same name and finally pasting the code back into place. Not very fun at all.

Now I just discovered that there is a much easier way to recover! I just open the .csproj file in Notepad. There I’ll find XML tags like these:

<File
    RelPath = "controls\vdCalendar.cs"
    SubType = "Code"
    BuildAction = "Compile"
/>
<File
    RelPath = "controls\vdCalendar.resx"
    DependentUpon = "vdCalendar.cs"
    BuildAction = "EmbeddedResource"
/>
<File
    RelPath = "dialogs\FAbout.cs"
    SubType = "Code"
    BuildAction = "Compile"
/>
<File
    RelPath = "dialogs\FAbout.resx"
    DependentUpon = "FAbout.cs"
    BuildAction = "EmbeddedResource"
/>

By walking through the list of files and changing each into the desired “SubType” it is much easier to recover:

<File
    RelPath = "controls\vdCalendar.cs"
    SubType = "UserControl"
    BuildAction = "Compile"
/>
<File
    RelPath = "controls\vdCalendar.resx"
    DependentUpon = "vdCalendar.cs"
    BuildAction = "EmbeddedResource"
/>
<File
    RelPath = "dialogs\FAbout.cs"
    SubType = "Form"
    BuildAction = "Compile"
/>
<File
    RelPath = "dialogs\FAbout.resx"
    DependentUpon = "FAbout.cs"
    BuildAction = "EmbeddedResource"
/>

But then again, I may be the only person alive who can annoy Visual Studio 2003 to this extent in the first place!