Update: This bug was reviewed and solved by MS as soon as is humanly possible (probably due to the huge amount of exposure it got). See this post for details.

---

It's completely amazing to me that VS.NET 2005 RTM, after a big cycle of testing, alphas, betas and LOTS of community feedback, can be this buggy. All I'm really doing is working on a very small Winforms projects on a VPC with 1 GIG of ram, and appearing out of nowhere, the compiler decided that it can't find any "StringBuilder, Form or Component types in any assemblies. As if I've lost all the references to System assemblies in my project (which of course, I did not!)

Now what? What on earth do I do with this this amazingly stupid and bizarre case? do I even bother to look this up? Probably. Because if I can come across this so easily, many other devs will have come across this too, sadly.

After a little searching, I actually couldn't come up with anything useful.

This is terribly frustrating and the last thing I would expect from this (I expect bugs, but not this kind of horribly huge amazingly *can't even find a word to describe this* annoying bugs).

 

It's 3.30 am. I'll go to sleep now. I hope in the morning VS 2005 will decide it will let me work again. I wouldn't be surprised if a reboot solved this, though I will never understand why (or refuse to understand even if I could).