I’m working on a Silverlight project and I was creating a few basic states for hovering my mouse over a button, clicking, and removing my mouse from a button.

Well it wouldn’t load!

The error that I was seeing was, “Unexpected PROPERTYELEMENT in parse rule PropertyElement ::= . PROPERTYELEMENT Content? ENDTAG..”

Uhm… What?

A google search shows a few things on Unexpected Directives but nothing that was helping me.

It said it was on line 0 character 0… that makes no sense.

However, there were 2 other errors coming up regarding fill elements.  So I decided to take care of those.  For some reason, Blend 2 added several Elipse.Fill elements with no properties and child Ellipse.Fill elements which also contained no properties.  I cleared that up in Visual Studio, went back to Blend and Blend wanted to update like it should.  Cool – well I switched back to visual studio and blend put those dang things in again!  Ugh.

So I closed Blend, praying that all the work that I’d just done wasn’t going to be one of those instances where it’d take less time to recreate than to debug.  I opened the project in Blend and was relieved to see now that Blend didn’t like the XAML either.  Cleaned out the excess ellipse.fill elements, saved, came back to blend, told it to update and… yay!  There aren’t any errors.

That lack of errors includes the strange error mentioned earlier.