View controller not loading view from .nib

I ran into a new debugging problem where a view controller was not showing anything from it's nib file.  It was just transparent.  I attempted to debug it, reconnected all the interface builder items.  I finally figured out that I had implemented loadView instead of viewDidLoad to do some initialization.  This caused the nib file to be ignored, the code was expecting me to programmatically create my view, which I wasn't doing.

There was no obvious error for this one, figuring it out cost a couple of hours.