"Object not set to an Instance..." in the IDE

[Technocratic]

I have a solution that consists of 3 projects. A base project, and 2 that inherit from it. For some reason, on many of the inherited forms, when I try to view them in the IDE by clicking on them in the Solution Explorer, I just get a white screen that says:

An error has occured while loading the document. Fix the error, and then try loading the document again. The error message follows: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I'm in design time though! Why is it trying to instantiate the form? I've noticed it doing things like that recently, when I would open an inherited form, it would act like I'm running the program for a minute (bringing up my signin screen and everything) then go into design mode for the selected form. But now I can't even get to most of them because of this error.

The projects themselves run fine. It's just access to the forms in the IDE that has become a problem.

Hopefully there's some odd option or parameter that I can change that will get it back to "normal", but I've been searching and can't find an answer! Maybe I'm missing something obvious!?

 

[chiph]

For the IDE to be able to present the IntelliSense, etc. for your assemblies, it has to be able to load them and then use reflection on them. If the DLL or EXE were corrupt in some way, it would have a problem doing that.

Which isn't to say that there isn't a problem with the IDE. I had to reinstall once to correct a problem I was having.

I would manually delete the DLL or EXE from your bin directory(s) and see if the project loads (don't forget to unload it from the GAC with GACUtil if you need to first!)

Chip H.


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