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Running Visual Studio 17.2.3. I've got a solution that consists of many projects built against.Net5. I've suddenly lost the ability to add forms to dependent projects. If I try to add a new form to a project, the "Form (Windows Forms)" template does not display when clicking on "Add->New Item..." for the selected sub-project. However, if I select the project set as the "startup project" and click on "Add->New Item...", the Form template does appear.

I've tried using the solution indicated in "Missing Windows Form Templates in newly Installed Visual Studio 2015" in particular, running 'devenv /Intalltemplates" but it did nothing.

UPDATE: June 9 - I added a new project to the solution. I noticed that when adding a new item to the new project, it did display "Form (Windows Forms)" as a template. I also noticed a difference in the dependent frameworks. The projects that show the form template all contain a dependency on "Microsoft.WindowsDesktop.App.WindowsForms". Is there any way to add this dependency?

rrirower
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  • Check [this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43127718/how-do-i-add-features-to-visual-studio-2017), is for a more recent VS. – Cleptus Jun 05 '22 at 16:40
  • Thanks for the tip. However, I ran a Modify with the Installer and the template still does not appear. – rrirower Jun 06 '22 at 18:08

1 Answers1

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After looking into my update above, I found that the following flag was missing from the projects that no longer allowed for adding a Form to the project:

<UseWindowsForms>true</UseWindowsForms>

I'm not sure why the flag was removed. Once I added the above flag to the affected projects, "Forms" then reappeared as a template.

I started to notice the problem after I had updated Visual Studio 2022 to version 17.2.3. I'm not sure if that is related.

rrirower
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  • Works for me. I'm just wondering why it compiles and runs just fine without this setting. – PMF Jul 20 '23 at 07:56