Why is Rider's Windows Form designer crippled with bugs?

Answered

Or in other words, when will the Windows Form designer be ready for production?

I switched from Visual Studio to Rider because I am familiar with PyCharm and I am happy about the switch. I think Rider is superior to Visual Studio on may aspects.

But there is one thing where Rider seems to be horrible: the Windows Forms designer. Here are a few things that happened to me in the last 5 minutes.

  • It often says it needs to be reloaded (bad), and if I reload it Rider hangs and I need to kill it (worse)
  • Sometimes (after renaming something?) it introduces some errors in the file and it is not able to open it; I need to manually edit the file and fix the problems so I can reopen it with the designer
  • Clicking on a control from the toolbox, then on the form, sometimes it inserts the correct control, sometimes the wrong one, sometimes nothing
  • The properties panel shows up with columns with the wrong size (sometimes one of the two columns is squeezed to a few pixels)
  • Clicking on a drop down or other fields in the properties panel sometime does nothing; I need to close the editor and reopen it in order to change one property value

This is not a full list, it's a list of problems I hit in the last 5 minutes. It is so bad I don't even know where to start reporting the problems. When I see a tool that works so poorly I can't even bother reporting problems.

Is anybody using it?

Do I need to use Visual Studio for the form editing?

Why is JetBrains releasing a tool that is not even ready for alpha testing?

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7 comments

Hi Stefano Menci

Sorry to hear you were disappointed with our WinFoms designer. We had a huge update for the designer in the 2021 Rider version. Have you already try it? Do you have all these cases there? 

If so, is there any chance you could share your project with us to try reproducing the mentioned cases? It allows us to investigate the issues. 

Thank you in advance! 

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Hi Alexandra, 

I think I'm using the latest version of Rider:

My Toolbox Manager looks like the one shown in the article from your link.

There is no need for me to share my project, the problems exists in any project. I just tried creating a new Windows Form project from scratch, adding a new form and adding 2 drop downs, I ended up with one drop down and one data grid view, the data grid view size was 0x0 pixels, the banner at the top said reload designer. 

10 seconds of work and a long list of bugs. JetBrains has obviously invested zero hours in QA with the form designer.

I would be happy to report the bugs, but it would take days, and most of them are difficult to reproduce. For example I find myself resizing the columns of the property panel, because sometimes one of the two columns shrinks down to a few pixels, but I have not yet understood when it does it. Also, I noticed that refactoring some variables will cause the .cs file to have the new name on some areas and not on other areas, with the result that a control has the old name on half code and the new name on the other half, but again, this is not easily reproducible. Or when you click on a property field, the field may or may not be editable, depending on who knows what.

The thing needs some serious QA work. As is, it's at best frustrating, at worst useless.

What are other users using? Working with Rider's form editor is not even close to being productive. I will try using Visual Studio as form editor, but it is sad that I pay for a product delivered in such poor conditions.

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I haven't used the form designer for a few hours and I didn't have any form editor open.

I pressed Shift+F7 to open it, but didn't work (1).

I opened it with the mouse using the context menu, both the property panel and the form editor seemed to be correct, but it said it needed to be reloaded (2).

I didn't click reload, because I learned the hard way that it often causes Rider to hang (3), so I closed it and reopened it. It opened correctly but the first column in the property panel was squeezed down to a few pixels (4):

Just a few clicks and I hit 4 bugs, none of them is reliably reproducible. I can keep giving you small reports like this every 30 seconds, but the truth is that the form editor is unusable.

Do you have plans to fix it?

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Hi Stefano Menci

I apologize for the delay. 

Thank you for the detailed description. It seems like you met with several issues like RIDER-63352, RIDER-58753, RIDER-63333, RIDER-63328, RIDER-28681. Some of them are already fixed in the EAPs. Also, one can see the list of all actual known issues related to WinForms Designer here.  

>I noticed that refactoring some variables will cause the .cs file to have the new name on some areas and not on other areas, with the result that a control has the old name on half code and the new name on the other half, but again, this is not easily reproducible.

Please, let us know if you meet this issue again, or will have any other details about it so we could reproduce it. If Rider hangs, we will need your logs to investigate the case. 

You can follow the mentioned issues to be notified once they are resolved.  

If you have any other questions, do not hesitate to ask.  

 

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I haven't seen RIDER-64917 happening in a few days.

It did reproduce right after I received a comment on the bug report (and I attached the logs) and just a few times after that. When I was working more on forms it would reproduce every minute and I would switch to Visual Studio.

Perhaps it has not reproduced in the last few days because I have moved some files from the folder IntelliClad down to the subfolder IntelliClad\SettingsLib. Now the form's namespace is IntelliClad.SettingsLib.

I will add more logs and any comment that comes to mind if I see it reproducing again.

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Stefano Menci

thank you! We'll take a look at this issue. 

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With 2024.3 , the issue with designer panel persists.

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