2005 RTM: A circular control reference has been made. A control cannot be owned by or parented to itself.

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2005 RTM: A circular control reference has been made. A control cannot be owned by or parented to itself.

Well, dang.

I had re-done a form that was causing me other problems with the designer. All seemed fine, I went home, and returned to the form this morning to find this:

A circular control reference has been made. A control cannot be owned by or parented to itself.

This form has a few split containers on it. This instability is very frustrating. Anyone else ever see this



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2005 RTM: A circular control reference has been made. A control cannot be owned by or parented to itself.

  • Sentinel3304

    If you are confident that this is a designer bug, see if you can create a sample project and/or instructions to reproduce the problem, then log a bug report at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/.

  • PennyB

    I am using VC++ 2005 getting the same problem when the designer wrote wrong things in code and I changed them manually. Program works fine (as far as I can see), but designer still gives me the error.

  • -_Cypher_-

    Will do that if I get some time. If anyone else beats me to it, my thanks to them in advance.

    One very positive thing I have to say about Microsoft is they seem to be making customer feedback a top priority.


  • Mark Vernon

    Has anyone found a solution to this problem I have VS 2003, 2005, and 2008 and I am getting this issue in all of them. It seems like after five years they would've found a way to keep the designer from doing this, or at the very least provide us with an error message that will allow us to fix it by hand.

  • kmassey

    It's a Designer bug.  I think the problem occurs when you put one SplitContainer inside another and then start going around renaming the SplitContainers.

    Double-click the related warning in the errors list, and it will bring you into the line in the *.Designer.vb file that's causing the problem.  It will look something like this:

    Me.SplitContainer1.Panel2.Controls.Add(Me.SplitContainer1)

    Change it so that the parent isn't the same name as the inner split container.  i.e. something like:

    Me.splitMain.Panel2.Controls.Add(Me.SplitContainer1)

    You may have to do similar massaging in other places in the file, but you should be able to restore your form.

    -Richard


  • Jeltz

    I am seeing the same problem... I have a mock Outlook style UI with nested split containers, etc. It worked fine in the designer and I can build it however when I execute it I get a nasty popup saying there is a serious issue and that it has to be shutdown. So I exited VS 2005 and came back in this morning and reloaded from source server and now the designer is complaining of a circular reference....
  • 2005 RTM: A circular control reference has been made. A control cannot be owned by or parented to itself.
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