im a noob to visual basic 2008 and somehow managed to close my design tab and now i cannot find it anywhere, its not on the bar on the right hand side????does anyone know how to help me?????thanks in advance

Familiarize yourself with the Solution Explorer and the main menu options. To show the designer for a form select the form in Solution Explorer and select View Designer (main View menu, or with context menu in Solution Explorer). Double-clicking the node in Solution Explorer has the same effect.

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when your VB 2008 is open, press SHIFT+F7...

another method is : ALT+V, ALT+D...

yet another method is : Go to the View menu and click on Designer, duh...

All of those solutions sound great in theory, but none of them work for me, and I have the same problem. I created a form, designed a window, and when I opened it up again the design window was nowhere to be seen. I'm new to this IDE and Visual Basic, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing (self-teaching, you know how that goes, especially with a hobby like programming). Anyone care to tell me why nothing happens when I press Shift+F7 or double click the node in the solution explorer, and why I don't have a designer option in my view menu or in the context menu when clicking on my form in the solution explorer?

It might be that you're trying to open a class in the form designer which wont work if it doesn't have the *.designer.vb file for the designer to use. This is just a guess without knowing more about what you're trying to open.

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Currently using: VS 2005 & 2008 Pro w/sp1 on Win7 Ultimate x64.


There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those who can count and those who can't.
4 out of 3 people have trouble with fractions.

Windows has a 64 bit GUI for a set of 32 bit extensions on a 16 bit shell for an 8 bit OS using a 4 bit kernel made by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

Well, the problem in my case might have been that I was adding code to the *.designer.vb file instead of to the *.vb file. I don't know why I was doing that - I added a button, double clicked it to add code, and that's where it had me adding code. I recreated the project from scratch and I now can access the design mode.