I inherited a project done in InfoPath 2007 where the forms were created with the InfoPath form designer outside of Visual Studio 2005. The developer who created the forms had a problem with the environment and was not able to get VS 2005 to work with Infopath. My install of VS works with IP just great, unfortunatly, it does not seem to like the forms created by the other developer. If I create a new form wihin the VS IDE, I can double click the manifest and have VS open it in the designer. If I try that with one of the forms from the other developer from the project added to my VS Solution, all that happens is the manifest is opened as an xml file in an editor window. If I right click and say open it in the Designer I get a message that the file cannot be opend with opened with the selected editor.
I tried to create a form from within VS with the same name and data connections and then copy/paste the xml from the old form into the new files but that is extremely time consuming. I have about a dozen forms that need to be imported and the copy/paste method is not the way i want to go.
I tried to create a form in VS by using the existing form as a template. That created a form which looked correct but would not compile. I get a lot of 'FormName.InfoPath_Form_Template.DatasetName' already contains a definition for '_schemaSerializationMode''. It looks like everything declared in the dataset gets duplicated.
Is there a method by which I can import the existing InfoPath 2007 forms into Visual Studio 2005?