Since I'm using VC++ 2010 Express I've twice experienced the phenomenon that suddenly the two forms of an app containing two forms looked exactly the same in the Forms Designer (editor tab titled "Form1.h [Design]" e.g.). Luckily this only happened to really unimportant test projects so far, otherwise I'd certainly have attached the blazing red smiley to this post instead of that lilac one. Incidentally, it happened to two projects containing exactly two forms up to now. Of course it's impossible to happen to a project having only a single form, but I don't see any compelling reason why it should be impossible with projects containing more than two forms.

I couldn't yet spot the files that contain this visual form design. Originally I supposed the .resX files to hold this data, but they apparently only hold miscellaneous information on the forms like the position of objects on the Forms Designer's tray in the project I examined. The .h file itself (in code view instead of design view) seems to be intact, BTW, and I think it might be possible to reconstruct the form's design view from the information in InitializeComponent() if only I found a way to force the IDE to do that.

What I tried so far to no avail: cleaning the project and selecting "Update managed resources" from the .h file's context menu in Project Explorer.

Any comments?