I’m doing a SmartPhone session at a conference next week and I just found out that my VS.Net 2005 install is broken for any mobile development. When I open a new project or existing device project I get no form designer.

Yup, the project creates just fine, and Form1 is there and tries to open but here’s what I get:

The designer comes up, there’s no error but the visual designer has gone MIA.

I did a complete reinstall of Visual Studio and checked to make sure the .NET Compact Frameworks for both 1.1 and 2.0 are installed and they are. I also checked out Pocket PC 2.0 applications which  exhibit the same behavior.

Part of the problem might be this: When I got to add References for the project the dialog comes up completely empty:

This dialog should be showing all the .NET compact framework system assemblies. But there’s nothing there. This stuff used to go into the Vs.NET install somewhere but I’ll be damned if I know where and how this stuff gets registered. This is for SmartPhone. For Pocket PC I show only the System.Sql* references, none of the System assemblies.

This looks like an install SNAFU. Can somebody try creating a new Pocket PC project and see if it works for you? This looks like an installation bug to me…

Aargh… this stuff had been working fine with the RC.

To make things even worse I called MS Support and I got the nice official – ‘not supported until November 7^th’ answer. Practical…

<sigh> Why can’t things just for once be easy with this fucking device stuff?

What really bugs me about this is that VS installed without any errors or messages. There are no load errors, no package load messages – all stuff I had in previous installs. As far as I can tell VS works well for Web and WinForm dev. It’s always the device stuff that has some sort of problem.

Another bummer - I called MSDN support in hopes of getting this resolved ASAP and having an official support incident - it turns out there's no support until official release on November 7th...