I've had this problem before. I'm not exactly sure what causes it, but rarely I'll open a dataset in the design view and only the XML markup shows. The first time this happened I made the mistake of running some Visual Studio reinstall command I found out there and lost a bunch of my personal settings. Here's the quick, painless solution:
- Close the dataset file.
- Find the file in the solution explorer, and click on the plus sign [+] to expand the subfiles of the .xsd file.
- Delete the .Designer.cs or .Designer.vb subfile. It will probably be the first of three subfiles.
- Reopen the .xsd file to regenerate the .Designer.cs/.vb file thereby restoring your design view.
If that doesn't work you can always try a Visual Studio repair of some sort, but remember to backup your Visual Studio settings and any Code Snippets you've tweaked.