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I am experiencing some very strange behavior with Blend:

Since weeks i am working an a project where I use Blend 4 and Visual Studio 2010 simultaneously. I've never experienced problems with one of these programs or with their co-existence. Work proceeds fine.

But a few minutes ago - from one boot of the computer to the next - Blend seems to have a serious problem:

From now on I am not able alter any value anywhere in my project. I can't create new Controls on a plain surface as well delete existing ones. If i try to alter some attribute of some existing control, the width of an existing button for example nothing happens:

Drag and Drop with the mouse results in nothing more than a slight flickering of the control which looks like if it is fighting against my modification to retain its current value. Regardless what manipulation I apply with the mouse the control stays untouched neither does any value in the properties-panel of Blend change.

It feels as if my project is in read-only mode or locked somehow.

But now comes the frustrating fact: When I apply the modifications described above nothing changes BUT the corresponding XAML code does! Enlarging the width of a button with the mouse doesn't show any effect at the control itself or in the properties pane but the XAML attribute width is changing as I move the mouse ?!

Did anybody also experience this behavior before ? Does anyone has some suggestions ? Maybe the solution is very obvious and just made a fool of myself but I got really stuck with that problem - so any help or suggestions are very much appreciated ... Thanks in advance !

EDIT: It really seems to be a Blend problem because when I open the project in Visual Studio everything is working as it should ...

marc wellman
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Are you certain that there is not a control sitting on top of the others?

Alternatively, are your other controls in a panel (perhaps a grid) that has it's visibility set in a trigger? If so, Visual Studio displays controls visibility a little differently than Blend does. Blend attempts to get the property to which you bound your visibility during design time, whereas Visual Studio seems to display the item so long as you have visibility initially set to visible.

Can we see some code to make sure?

CodeWarrior
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  • Hi and thank you very much for your answer. In the meanwhile since posting the question I've made some progress in investigating what's going on: The phenomenon appears in every XAML file i open with Blend. Even when i create a completely new project with a plain XAML i am not able to create any object on it. Furthermore I experience the following: After rebooting my machine, starting Blend I am indeed able to create a new project with a plain XAML that behaves normally. ... [I'll cont. in the next comment :)] – marc wellman Jan 12 '12 at 17:55
  • [continued from prev. comment] ... But as soon as I close this new project and load my current working project Blend again starts to come up with this error. Then after closing this project, ending Blend, restarting Blend and again creating a new project I also have this error here (Although creating a new project did succeed **before** i opened my working project. Because i experience this error in all of my dozens of XAML files I think it won't help to post some code. I am currently thinking of re-installing Expression Studio, although I really want to avoid that :) – marc wellman Jan 12 '12 at 17:58
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    Re-trace your steps, can you think of anything you may have done before this began? At first it sounded like maybe you were running into a memory issue but from what you explained, sounds like a build issue of some sort. – Chris W. Jan 12 '12 at 18:03
  • Yes Chris, at first I thought in the same way. I have now rebooted my machine several times without doing anything to solve the problem but suddenly the error is gone. I have currently no idea how to reproduce this error but as long as it will not come back again I will stop thinking about it - not the best solution but because of a lack of time and an overload of frustration (that came from silly error searching) I will continue my work on the project :) I hope I don't see me posting again in 5 minutes ;) – marc wellman Jan 12 '12 at 18:14
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    Ya no worries, one thing you'll run into often with blend, is a pinnacle need for as much RAM as possible. It's a memory hog which can cause some odd issues from time to time but it can be a beautiful beast. Good luck amigo! – Chris W. Jan 12 '12 at 19:24