I find vs 2003 to be unstable ....

[ZeBula8]

is it just me?

I have already lost 2 apps ... completely!!

I have written a class press F5 to run it and <blam> all of the controls on the form vanish - and the app is gone - code is still there but all controls are gone!!

I've spent weeks for nada....

didn't have this problem with 2002

[Edneeis]

Never had or heard of that before, sorry.

[Pirate]

Neither I , except from some bloody mess with tabpages . They just get shuffled . Maybe by any means , you selected all controls and del key pressed by another means and this just happened .I recommend you do backup everyday or even better every couple of hours for your proj . I do this and had no problems .

[Edneeis]

See if the code is still in the autogenerated section at the top of the form. If it is then something must be going wrong on the form itself. Often when a control disappears its because the IDE doesn't write the proper Controls.Add statement for the form itself. I've ony seen this when trying to type code in the auto generated code section, which gets rewritten during certain changes to the form. Typically the IDE first writes a list of the control declarations then initializes them one by one and sets up their properties the last it adds them all to the form.

'list of controls
Friend WithEvents Label1 As System.Windows.Forms.Label

'intialize
Label1=New System.Windows.Forms.Label()

'properties
Label1.Text="Label1"
Label1.Font=Me.Font
Label1.Location=New Point(10, 10)
Label1.Visible=True

'at the end of all of those it adds them to the controls collection of the form
Me.Controls.AddRange(New Control(){Label1})