Events tab randomly appears and disappears in VS 2008

Question

I know it's a minor annoyance.. but it's still an annoyance and it baffles me.. About 3 months ago I was using VS 2008 and when I went to the "Properties" tab there was the little lightning bolt for events(in design mode). Then it suddenly went away.. about a week later I discovered that if I didn't have the properties tab "stickied", then the events thing would be there, but not when its stickied.

This morning all of this was working fine. Now today I went to add an event, and suddenly the little lightning bolt icon is no longer there. I can not see any option disabling and it disappeared without me doing any reconfiguration.. Even without restarting VS. And I have tried restarting VS to no avail..

What am I missing here? Is this a highly annoying bug in VS 2008(its up to date) or am I missing some configuration?

Update I'm attaching a bounty to this question to see if I can get something a bit more helpful. In short it seems like the event tab will appear and disappear on a month or two cycle. And it's not a context problem. I have my cursor inside of a button for instance and I can edit all the properties of the button yet the events tab does not show up... More confusing is that yet again, this was working a few weeks ago

alt text http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/6301/eventsx.png

Answer 1

The Events tab is driven by the designer. If the designer is active, or the source view is active but the designer is synced, you should see the Events tab. Once you change the source view content, the designer will be out of sync and won't show the Events tab anymore. You can get the Events tab to show up again by switching to the designer and back.

You can tell whether the designer is synced by looking at the type information in the Property Grid. If it is synced, you'll see the full .NET class name (e.g. for a Button, you'll see something like Button1 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button), and if it's not synced, you'll just see an XML element (e.g. Button1 <BUTTON>). Also, the list of properties available for the element and how they are arranged in the Property Grid will change according to whether it's using the type properties, or the schema properties.