Solved a very frustrating problem with Visual Studio 2008 today thanks to a post from Arian Kulp.  My problem started when I installed the MS Office 2010 release a few days ago, although I didn’t know that until I saw this post.

My problem was with the ASPX designer in Visual Studio 2008.  For the last few days I’ve noticed that when I switch from Source view to Designer view Visual Studio would work for a second and then lock up.  There was no way out of it.  I was getting quite frustrated since I needed to get some work done and I wanted to use the designer along with the source code.

So I turned to Bing and started to do some searches.  After a few failed attempts I came across Arians post and also the referenced post by Martin Hinshelwood about Office 2010 issues with the Web Authoring Component.

http://ariankulp.com/archive/2010/03/02/web-form-designer-lockup-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx

http://geekswithblogs.net/hinshelm/archive/2009/07/19/office-2010-gotcha-2-visual-studio-2008-locks.aspx

I hope these links help you as much as they did me.  Thanks Arain and Martin!

Enjoy!