I have attached a screen snippet of a maintenance form. I also included a snippet of the properties for the MaintenanceFormToolStrip. It has "UI_New", "UI_Browse", etc., in place of the standard terms.



What did I do wrong, now?!?



Another setback. I cannot post the application updates with this behavior.



Help, please,

Cool

Unbelievable.



ALL, and I mean ALL, maintenance form toolstrips are now showing the same thing (UI_New, UI_Browse, UI_Edit, UI_Delete, etc.)!







All I did was make a change to a report and added some small code changes to a button on one specific window. Then, I posted the code to the server. When I went back into my code to look at working on another change that a user requested, I encountered the text changed on the buttons on the toolstrip on the form that I wanted to edit. I checked on a number of other forms that have the same toolstrip. They all have reverted to the same thing. UGLY! I do not know when this happened.



This is now a huge problem...either I revert EVERY form back to a time when the form was correct (via code source) or I manually change EVERY form and fix the text on each property. Either way, the situation is grim. I already posted the updated code to the server. Users are downloading it and updating their clients as I am writing this. I cannot stop the rollout. They are going to have forms that look TERRIBLE!



What am I doing wrong? Why did this happen? Is there a solution to this somewhere? I thought I had this solved. But, I guess not.



Is anyone else running into this? If so what did you do to solve this problem?



Any help is certainly appreciated!

I picked one form to try to figure out what is going on...it is the PackingList.cs form. The last revision on the form is Tuesday, July 7th at 6:21pm. The stored revision is well before the update that I made to 1.7.0 (including the update to DevEx). The designer file matches the current working copy EXACTLY. Even if I revert to that revision, nothing will seem to change.



Stumped.

Is there any explanation for this? I do not want to revert any of my files to a previous revision. Not for this problem. The problem should NOT have occurred. Toolstrip customizations are a StrataFrame thing. How did I trigger a solution-wide revision of every toolstrip to use some kind of default localization-like constant?!? I'll admit, I probably did something to provoke this; however, I doubt it.



Btw, I did revert the file to a previous revision. Scary...it did not change back. The UI strings are still showing up incorrectly.

There is something going on within your environment. Let's start with basics. Just FWIW, this code hasn't changed since version 1.5 of SF. So I really don't think that SF is doing anything here, otherwise the entire SF user base would be reporting this same issue.



Your localization environment of your application could have an effect, but I am going to need more details to help you work through this. If you look at the SF source code, the privates attempt to retrieve the localization value.



For example:







This is done at this point to allow the value to be overwritten via the designer. So it sounds to me like you have one of several issues going on. Before I get into each point, do the following:



1. Create a new SF application

2. Create a form and drop on a Maintenance Form Toolstrip

3. Build the project

4. Run the project

5. Get out of VS

6. Re-open the dialog with the MFTS

7. At this point, are the values showing the UI_New, etc. keys?



if the above did not fail, then you have something going on within your project, if not, then you have something going on within your development environment. This will help to know which way to nudge you.

I created the new app and have no issues with the MFTS. So, my solution which is made up of 12 projects is messed up somehow? I'll need a nudge.



BREAKING NEWS!



I decided to open up my solution and count the number of projects in it so I could respond above. When the PackingList form came up, it was FINE! I closed the solution and reopened it several times after the initial discovery of the UI string problem. Each time I opened it, the forms were incorrect. This time, after I created a new project in response to your suggestion, the form is correct. THEY ARE ALL CORRECT, NOW! I just spot checked a few more.



So...what just happened here?

It sounds like you have something in your code, possibly a user control or dialog that is creating an exception. Are you inheriting the MFTS or using it as is on your dialogs?



It does smell of an exception which could even be the inability to properly query the localization key which is embedded in an assembly. Have you checked your assembly references making sure that you don't have some point to 1.7 and others pointing to 1.6?

Oh, the reason that it worked after you closed the test project is because you did not get out of Visual Studio before you loaded YOUR solution. The SF assemblies were loaded in the VS AppDomain session and did not have to reload...thus it worked on your project dialogs because the SF assemblies had already been loaded. So most likely, after you compile your applicaiton, you will not see this behavior at run-time...just design time. Is this true?

The run-time code does not exhibit the behavior. And, yes, I closed the sample solution but not Visual Studio, then I opened my application's solution.



Too much consternation involved here. How do I confirm that the SF assemblies are loaded in the VS AppDomain session?

Write a complex add-in. The AppDomain is the application session domain that holds any loaded assembly. Once it is loaded it remains in the AppDomainuntil explicitly unloaded. VS is supposed to do this when an assembly is rebuilt but sometimes takes a try or two and the occasional getting out.



So it would seem that you have an exception somewhere in your code. Do you have user controls, etc? If you have written user controls and try to query a database in the New or the Load and do not test on the DesignMode flag you could have issues like this.



You might think back to what you had changed in your code when you began to notice the issue. Just FYI, this looks to just be a design-time issue, not run-time. So reverting back to source control versions will have no effect. When it showed up in these tests there was something else going on that allowed the SF assembly to load.

I'll skip the "complex add-in".



This all started with the installation of 1.7.0 in combination with DevEx 9.1. No user controls are involved.



I'll start walking through my code to see if I can find some hidden exception somewhere that is not popping up through normal debugging channels.

Well, the issue is that the Visual Studio IDE snuffs most exceptions that happen within the designer...making tracking this type of thing down more difficult.



But the good news is that all of your clients don't have "Ugly" dialogs.



One thing that you can do within your solution is pick a project, then go to the properties and set the DevEnv.exe as a debug EXE for that project. Run that project only, then when over in the new Visual Studio session that gets shelled, you can load up your solution again. But before you do, on the first VS session, do a Ctrl+Alt+E or click Debug -> Exceptions and check the Common Language Runtime Exceptions check. This will stop automatically on any exception at that point.



Not super straight forward but may be one to to see if an exception is being thrown within the VS IDE.

The MFTS is used, as is. All assemblies have been verified (several times) and there are no lingering 1.6.x and below assemblies on my system anywhere.