Context menu greyed out in designer after working with TabControl

Question

Recently I have found that when right clicking my form or any component (or set of components) on it, the context menu will have every option but the "View Code" option greyed out, as well as everything on the "Format" menu, and the relevant shortcuts also fail to work. This means that I am unable to copy, paste, or delete controls, which pretty much makes the designer unusable.

I have noticed that when I load the form into the designer fresh, there are no issues. However, this form has a TabControl on it. Since I need to edit one of the other tabs, I go ahead and click on it to switch tabs. When I do this, two things happen: the symptoms noted above occur, and the mouse is "locked" to stay within the bounds of the TabControl. The mouse can be freed by clicking on the tab control again, but the greying out of the context and Format menus doesn't appear to be reversable. I'm inclined to think that the two issues are connected somehow.

Does anyone know what the problem is? If so, is there a workaround or fix for this that I can take advantage of? I am using Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi Ian Morrison,

 

Your issue is related to IDE, so we need to remove your thread to another forum. Could you tell me which language you are using, VB or C#? Each language has its own IDE forum.

 

These are the IDE forums:
VB: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vbide/threads.
C#: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharpide/threads.

Best regards,
Aland Li  

---

Please mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark if they don't. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Answer 2

I vaguely remember this as being a problem in VS2003, but I'm almost sure it was fixed with the installation of Service Pack 1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=69d2219f-ce82-46a5-8aec-072bd4bb955e&displaylang=en

I can't guarantee that this will fix the issue though as it didn't occur very often for me and it's been a while now since I used VS2003.

---

Mick Doherty
http://dotnetrix.co.uk

Answer 3

Sorry, I'll try to be more careful about which forum to stick my questions in next time!

I'm actually using managed C++ for the purposes of integration with my own C++ library... not the wisest of decisions in retrospect, but here I am anyways.

Answer 4

Hi Ian Morrison,

I am moving this thread from Base "Windows Forms Designer" forum to the "Visual C++ General" forum, since the issue is related to Visual C++ IDE. There are more C++ experts in the " Visual C++ General" forum.

Best regards,
Aland Li

---

Please mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark if they don't. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Answer 5

While not an outright solution, I have found a workaround. If I cycle between the tab pages using tab and shift+tab, the issue does not occur. Not ideal, but it lets me get back to throwing controls around willy-nilly.