Unable to select components or events from dropdowns in visual studio ide

Question

I suddenly have a problem with my visual studio 2019 community
Project type is visual basic.

The dropdown lists that appear immediately above the code window have stopped functioning correctly.
eg
the middle dropdown enables you to select a component, say button1, and then select the event you want to handle.
However, though the components on the form are listed, it's not possible to select them.
Visual studio just had an update, don't know if it's anything to do with that?
Anyone else having this problem?

Answer 1

See also: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/426961/.

To work around the problem, go to Form Designer, select the control, go to Properties (press <F4>), go to Events tab (click “⚡”), and double-click the required event.

To handle the Click event of a button, just double-click the button in Form Designer.

Answer 2

This is a workaround that sounds nice but hides a very stupid bug in VS2019.
Why are new releases not tested, especially these kind of bugs should never ever happen.
They impact productivity and make it almost impossible to work properly.
I expect a quick fix in the next update.

Answer 3

This might be intentional, but I am using Visual Studio since the first ever versions and it was not like that. The same issue also occurs also in ASP.NET for example. Was working before and is just broken now.

Answer 4

I realize that it's been 6 months since the last response, but my VS2019 just started doing this. It was working fine up to this point. I just installed an update which I don't think I can uninstall. I'd like to correct the idea that VB.Net is now acting like C#. Wrong. In C#, I can still see all the event handler methods in the far right dropdown. They just aren't attached to the objects in the adjacent dropdown. If I know the name of the method, I can select it and jump to it. I can't do that with this bug in VB.net. The event methods don't show up at all. Why would they take out a great VB.Net feature that makes coding more efficient to make it like the inferior behavior of C#? If this is intentional behavior on MSFT part, they should make C# work like VB.Net, not the other way around! BTW, I still have VS2017 installed on my main computer ... VB.Net still works correctly there.

Answer 5

Very odd. I just installed VS 2022 (community) a few days ago and in my VB.Net projects, I have all 3 dropdowns I had before and the methods dropdown works fine now. That dropdown recently stopped being attached to the objects dropdown in VS 2019. In VS 2019 now, that events dropdown just lists a set of methods that are attached to what appears to be a random object and if you select another object, the methods list never changes. I posted a screenshot of my VS 2022. I hope it comes through on the post. This problem is looking more and more like a massive bug instead of something MSFT is changing intentionally.