VS2005 Crash on binding to data source II

Today I got a problem with VSTS 8.0.50727.42 that caused Visual Studio to just die, sometimes even without opening the error reporting dialog. This happened when trying to bind a DataGridView to a newly added object data source by using the popup toolbox of the grid. VS would vanish when I clicked the 'Choose data source' combo. No error message.

As I have had problems with the VS2005 data source mechanism before (data source crash I), I have some experience in troubleshooting data sources. I stared out checking for invalid, zombie data sources in the \My Project\DataSources\ folder (VB.NET), and removed an old, unused data source. This did not solve the problem, but I prefer to diagnose a clean solution.

When I made the new business entity object that I was adding as the new binding source, I also refactored some of the other entity objects to remove some obsolete properties and changed some property names to reflect gained knowledge about the domain.

I found out that VS2005 is not fond of such changes in the assemblies used as object binding sources. It is however, quite easy to make the data sources reflect the changes:

• Select the project in the solution explorer
• Click the 'Show all files' button
• Navigate to 'My Project' and expand it
• Navigate to the 'DataSource' child node and expand it
• Select each of the data sources in turn
• Right-click the data source and select 'Refresh'

Note that there is no refresh option on the 'DataSources' node in solution explorer, you have to manually refresh every single data source in your solution.

After refreshing the data source definition cache as described, VS2005 no longer performs harakiri in response to refactoring objects used as data sources.