I recently had an issue with Visual Studio and a pound sign, '#', character in a folder name. It turns out that you need to be careful when you name the folders that you put projects in.

I have a habit, left over from the olden days of about 6 years ago, of putting all of the project code that I work on in a 'C:\Programming' folder that I created. Sometimes when I create projects or web sites in Visual Studio I will create the projects under this folder. I have my 'C:\Programming' folder set up with sub folders indicating which language was used for the project. For instance, all of my C# coded apps were in the 'C:\Programming\C#' folder, all of my VB.NET apps were in 'C:\Programming\VB.NET' and so on.

One of the things I was most interested in when I first started using Visual Studio 2008, was the GUI's split code/design view for .aspx pages. For one web site, I created a C# web site in the 'C:\Programming\C#' folder. To my disappointment, the design view did not work well - especially when working with a master page. In fact it showed nothing in either the split code/design view or in just the design view only. There were no errors or anything. Just an empty screen.

I spent a while figuring out what was going on because a couple of other web sites that I had created under the wwwroot folder worked fine. Then it finally dawned on me that there was a non-alphanumeric character in the name of the path to my web site. So I change the name of my folder from 'C#' to 'CSharp' and the design view in VS2008 started working.

So if you are having problems with the VS2008 design view, make sure that the path to your project files does not have any odd characters in it.