How To: Fix Visual Studio 2008 Design View Hang / Not Working

Recently, I had to do some home .Net development (I mainly do .Net work only at ... work), but when I had some Internet issues and had to work offline, I loaded up my copy of Visual Studio 2008. I opened up my web project and everything seemed to be working fine until I tried to switch to design view on any page or control. Once I tried going to Design View, Visual Studio would stop responding and only a forced quit would close the application. Here's the environmental settings I was working with -

• Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft Office 2010 64-bit

Nothing out of the ordinary as you could see. Obviously, whenever I run into a problem like this, I load up a search engine and search for a solution and found quite a few complaints about this problem. However, after reading the "de facto" solution post from Microsoft, I felt as if I needed to more accurately spell out how to fix this problem since I only found the correct solution after reading through several posts.

1. Close Visual Studio.
2. Open up your Control Panel.
3. Go to your installed Programs and Features.
4. Look for an entry called Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component.
5. Right click on this entry.
6. Choose Change.
7. Select the option to Repair.
8. Re-open Visual Studio and try using design view in your web application.

Obviously, if you don't have this program, you need to install it. Fixing this problem, for me, was really that simple while other posts talked about editing your registry key for Office LastProduct, making sure you had Visual Studio SP1 installed, etc. However, I found that this was the easiest solution that worked for me.