Copy a Form?

I don't want to copy the form in a running program. I want to copy the underlying working files to enhance in the IDE. That is, within a VB project I'd like to take form1.vb and make a duplicate in the IDE to work on without messing up form1.vb.

The save as and other operations does stuff under the covers to the designer code of the form being copied, and other forms that may have references to that form, that prevents a simple copy and paste to a new form.

All I want is to take an existing form, that other forms have a refernce to, and make a copy that no other form references so that it appears in the IDE as a new form. The form that was copied should not be touched and any references to it should still work and not be fixed up to point to the copy.

I've tried to do this in VS 2005 but I wound up with a frmName in the project explorer that had a DIFFERENT name in Intellisense - how weird. The name that appear in the Intelliesense list didn't even appear to be in the project. No form had a property with the name that appeared in the Intellisense list.

Any way - as in the first post - this should be stone simple - I'm probably just missing something basic.

The filename in Solution Explorer is a physical filename, Intellisense does not use this name but uses the class name contained in the file. A form is just a class with a user interface, the class is split over a couple of files (frm.vb, frm.designer.vb, frm.resx)

So if you do a save as to save a new copy of you file, then go to this new form and change the name property form to a new name. Then you can add exisiting item and add your original form back to the project.

Then you have two copies of the form with different names both as a file and a form name.

>So if you do a save as to save a new copy of you file, then go to this new form and change the name property form to a new name. Then you can add exisiting item and add your original form back to the project.

Could someone decode this for me

Save as will create a copy of the file but the the copy will be the one refered to in you project.

However if you want both the copy and the original form in the project then you will have to add the original filename to the project.

If you do this you will have a conflict with the underlying name of the form as both are defining the same class name within the files, so you would have to change the name on one of the forms, to resolve the conflict and allow both forms to be in the same project.

Your code will reference the class contained in the file, not the file itself, hence when you add the original back in. You would disambiguate the between the copy and the original and rename the class in one of them.

So the filenames need to be different from an OS point of view.

The classes need to be different from a compiler point of view.

So in order to have both in the same project - you really would need to have different filenames and different form names.

Think when you copy a file in windows it doesnt have the same name it changes it to "Copy Of" the filename. As the compiler doesnt care about the filename it cares about the contents (ie. the class name) this is why you would need to change this.

Should the tool provide a better way to handle copying of forms - probably. This is just the workaround to allow you to make a copy of a form and have both in the project at the same time.