visual studio .net general: We are using .Net 2.0 Winforms, 3rd party assemblies etc.

As our build for multiple applications and assemblies gets more
complex Visual Studio gets harder and harder to deal with designer
crashes.

Usually clearing out the assembly cache. NLB, .SUO, full rebuild and
loading the Form (that has depenent controls a few times to prime it)
works. But now that work around is failing.

This is starting to grind our project to a halt.

Are there hot fixes for this?

I even saw the problem in a WPF Tutorial microsoft did.

Anyone know what the root cause is and how to organize projects to
avoid it?

The project that is failing on me now is not that complicated. But the
whole solution it's in is fairly complex.

Hi mswlogo,

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What is a "designer crash" exactly?

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You Click on a WinForm and Visual Studio goes into "Designer" or
"Design" mode.
It uses a lot of reflection and background compiling to get the
Designer to work as intelligently as it does.
But it's extremely complex at what it does and starts to fail as
dependencies get more complex.

As soon as you click on it (a Form Class), Visual Studio Crashes
(restarts). Sometimes it catches the exception and you can diagnose
code that's giving it problems. Sometimes you can't.

Lot's of rebuilds, cleaning out assembly cache etc. sometimes will get
you going for a while. But it gets progressively harder and harder to
get the designer up without crashing.