I have a problem with a Control Pane within ultradock Manager that only occurs when I am in debug mode in VS 2008. The pane appears not to exist when I "Start Debugging" (causing a null reference) but runs absolutely fine when I "Start Without Debugging".
Details are as follows:
I have a c# winform which uses the dock manager to dock another form on the left as a tab. This has been working great (i.e. the pane flys out when I hover over the tab).
I added a "Close" button to this docked form so that the user could choose that and have the pane fly back in to a tab. While trying to code the event handler for the Close button click event, I mistakenly had it call the "Close()" method of the ControlPane as follows:
this.ultraDockManager1.ControlPanes[panelName].Close();
That caused my pane to completely disappear, and I couldn't get it to show up again even after rebuilding, restarting VS 2008, and even rebooting. So I tried having my code run the following method (just once) to see if I could get things reset:
this.ultraDockManager1.ControlPanes[panelName].Reset();
That made it worse. Neither the pane nor the tab display still, but part of my form is now painted on the main form... weird.
I know now that I should have used the "FlyIn" method. I changed the code to use that, and it runs great when I "Start Without Debugging".
The weird behavior described above still occurs (and only occurs) whenever I "Start Debugging", and when I do so, the application blows up with the error "Object Reference Not set to an instance of an object" on the ControlPanes[ item.
I'm really stuck, and any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to be able to debug again :)
S
It sounds like a bug has caused the designer code to be serialized out incorrectly. If possible, I would recommend removing the dock manager and adding a new one. I would also recommend submitting the issue to the support group: http://ko.infragistics.com/gethelp.