My boss experienced an weird problem with his installation of Visual Web Developer Express 2008.

When he tried to view a web user control page in the design mode the application only displayed a blank white page. If he clicked on the “Source” view, all the code was there that was expected. Combing through the code didn’t produce anything that should have resulted in the error of things not loading.

It turns out the error was due to confusion on web user controls that also reference a CSS stylesheet. The rendering engine kind of gets choked on what’s going on. Jeff King, Program Manager for Visual Studio Web Tools, states that the quick fix is to just move the CSS style reference to the bottom of the page.

Sure enough everything worked.

For more details and an explanation of what’s occuring by Jeff King, visit the post on his website for all the information you need.

Image Source: Jeff King’s site

Post from: EveryJoe

Disappearing Web User Control in Design View