Problem with Office2003 Renderer and Tabbed MDI

Hmm... I tried opening our sample app's DockForm and changing the renderer (via the verb on DockManager) to the Office one. Then I saved and closed the form, rebuilt the project, and reopened the DockForm and it worked ok. Any idea what I'm not doing to repro it?

It's difficult for me to reproduce this consistently. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn't (following the same repro steps). Once it does show up though the solution seems to be hosed, and adding a DockManager to any other form or control results in the same problems. Oddly however, moving the solution to another machine seems to make the problem go away temporarily, but it still won't work on the original computer (even after restarting VS & restarting the machine), and it will eventually show the same errors on the new machine.

A couple things that may make this more likely however:

- One of the tool windows I'm using has it's "HasOptions" and "HasTitleBar" properties set to false, and all of the "Can" properties under Behavior set to false (CanAttach and CanAutoHide through CanFloat). This tool window has a NavigationBar control in it that has a location of -1, -1 and a size that puts it's right & bottom borders 1px off of the tool window area (hiding the border).

- I sometimes get the error with VS2005 renderer as well, but only one of them (refers to Renderer). I also sometimes get Object cannot be cast to the specified type or somesuch at line 0 with no file specified.

- It doesn't happen right away. I usually have to get pretty far into coding stuff before it shows up (even if I'm not touching the UI controls).

Also, these aren't errors that prevent debugging, they're just designer errors/warnings that mess up the UI.

hth

George

Actually I just got the second type of error message again. The other error message is: Object type cannot be converted to target type.

This popped up when I changed from code behind view to design view after wiring up some event (even though the design view was still open). It doesn't seem to refer to anything in my code however, and disappears when I delete the DockManager.

George

I haven't seen those occur. Could you possibly throw together a small sample project that demonstrates them and email it to us?

Let me get a small example app breaking and I'll send it along. Though like I said it seems to run fine (for a short while at least) when moving it to a new machine.

George

Got a new one breaking & sent it.

Interestingly, I couldn't figure out how to break it, but when I set "CopyLocal" to true on the DLL references used for the ActiPro UIStudio controls it broke. Do I need to include more references than the 4 DLLs it adds by default if I'm setting CopyLocal to true?

George

No you only need the 4 assemblies. I wonder if you are pulling in an old version somehow. Because if I recall correctly one of the older versions didn't have a proper type converter for the Office renderer since it takes a color scheme parameter in the constructor. I'll check out your sample though.