I got a project source codes developed by Visual C# 2012. I opened & built it without any problem. Then, I would like to open its visual portions; such as forms, buttons, ... I clicked "View" menu, I found the menu items are 'Code', "Solution Explorer", "Team Explorer", "Server Explorer", ... The item 'Designer' is missing. How come? How can I open 'Designer' view window?
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possible duplicate of [How do I open a Visual Studio project in design view?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17137556/how-do-i-open-a-visual-studio-project-in-design-view) – Pierre-Luc Pineault Jun 24 '15 at 03:02
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Yes, very close. Sorry for not studying it very carefully before posting it. – Stan Huang at Taiwan Jun 24 '15 at 03:33
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The designer view is only available for some classes. Those that have any graphical representation to be displayed, such as
- form and user control in WinForms
- window, page or user control in WPF
- view in ASP.NET
In case of these components the designer is available from the context menu in Solution Explorer. So open the solution explorer (View -> Solution Explorer, or Ctrl+W, S). Select one of the mentioned classes like form or user control. Right-click it and from the context menu select View Designer (or simply Shift+F7). That will move you to the designer view.
PiotrWolkowski
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Great, it works and the 'Designer' item appears under 'View' again. – Stan Huang at Taiwan Jun 24 '15 at 03:13
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BTW, per you said "Select one of the mentioned classes like form or user control", how can I easily to find all files which are forms or user controls because all file extensions are .cs and it's very inefficient to open it one by one? – Stan Huang at Taiwan Jun 24 '15 at 08:58
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