Visual Studio 2010 fails to show the design view of an aspx-page

This post was most recently updated on September 30th, 2022.

< 1 min read.

This post is about solving the issue with Visual Studio 2010 failing to show the design view of an .aspx-page. Luckily, it’s an easy and pretty classical fix.

Symptoms

Table of Contents

Whilst trying to view or edit an aspx-page in design mode within Visual Studio 2010, the window is just plain empty and there’s little you can do about it – selecting view markup or hitting F7 may not do anything, and restarting the Visual Studio doesn’t help.

empty aspx page design view — Design view failing to open

Solution

The Design view requires a connection to the SharePoint site where you’ll be deploying the solution (or rather, any site). Set the Site URL property in the project settings:

Then close the aspx page and reopen it, and it should work!

Have another workaround? Let me know in the comments section!

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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