Resolve Issues With Toolbox Items

• Aug 05, 2022
• 4 minutes to read

The DevExpress installer integrates DevExpress products into your Visual Studio instance. Most DevExpress products for the .NET Framework (WinForms, ASP.NET WebForms, WPF controls, XAF components) are available in the Visual Studio Toolbox.

This article explains how to resolve any issues with the Visual Studio Toolbox.

Make WinForms and WPF Controls Available in Toolbox (.NET 5+)

If you add the DevExpress products and use a NuGet feed instead of the Unified Component Installer, the toolbox does not contain DevExpress controls until you add the corresponding NuGet packages.

Go to Tools | NuGet Package Manager | Manage NuGet Packages for Solution and add the NuGet packages that contain the required controls to make these controls available in the Visual Studio Toolbox.

For WinForms projects, add the DevExpress.Win.Design package and make sure the “Automatically Populate Toolbox” setting in Visual Studio is enabled (“Tools | Options | Windows Forms Designer | General”). Note that you need to add this Design package even if you used a Unified Components Installer (in this case, you can add packages from the local NuGet feed).

Resolve Issues with Toolbox Items (.NET Framework)

This section explains how to resolve any of the following issues with Toolbox items:

• The Toolbox does not display items for DevExpress products.
• Visual Studio takes a long time to load the Toolbox.
• The Toolbox duplicates items for DevExpress products.

Walkthrough

1. Make sure that you installed the required product on your machine. For example, if you develop a WinForms project, ensure that DevExpress WinForms controls are installed. For this, run the DevExpress installer in Modify mode and check whether WinForms controls are selected:

   

   If you installed Visual Studio after DevExpress products, re-run the DevExpress installer in Repair mode to register DevExpress Toolbox items for that instance of Visual Studio.

2. Ensure that you set the correct target framework for your project. For information on supported target frameworks, refer to the following page: Shipping Versions & Supported Technologies.

   To check the target framework in your project, navigate to the project properties. The target framework version is displayed on the Application tab.

   

3. Starting with v13.1, the Repair ToolBox tool is installed with DevExpress controls and a link to it is available in Visual Studio. Run this tool to reinitialize the Visual Studio Toolbox.

   You can run the tool from the DevExpress toolbar menu or the Toolbox context menu:

   

   

   To diagnose the Toolbox, run this tool. If the tool cannot resolve the issue, we need to research your machine configuration to determine the cause of the issue, which will require collecting several log files. Perform the following steps for this:

   • Download the ToolboxAnalyzer archive and extract it to your local drive.
   • Run the ToolboxAnalyzer application.
   • Click the “Test Toolbox and attempt to repair it” button.

   • Follow the instructions provided by the application.

     If the application closes unexpectedly or crashes with an error, please collect all files from the %LocalAppData%\DX Toolbox Analyzer folder, create a new ticket regarding this problem, and attach logs to your message.

Completely Reset the Toolbox and Enable Visual Studio to Rebuild it From Scratch

After you install or update DevExpress products, you may experience issues with Toolbox items. Usually, these issues appear in Silverlight projects.

Walkthrough

Reset the Toolbox from Visual Studio: right-click the Toolbox and click “Reset Toolbox”. After the reset procedure is done, follow these steps:

For Visual Studio 2017 and newer:

1. Close Visual Studio.
2. Open the “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio*<version>* _<instance-id> “ folder and remove all the .TBD files.
3. Run the “regedit” tool (Regedit.exe). To do this, click the “Run” item in the Start menu and type “regedit” without quotation marks.
4. Load Visual Studio’s private registry as described in the following article in the Microsoft documentation: How to examine Visual Studio 2017 registry.
5. Find the “IsolatedHive\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>_<instance-id>\ToolboxControlsInstaller_AssemblyFoldersExCache” and “IsolatedHive\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>_<instance-id>\ToolboxControlsInstallerCache” keys;
6. Remove everything from these keys leaving them empty.
7. Unload the Visual Studio isolated hive.
8. Run Visual Studio again and wait until it recreates all items in the Toolbox.

If toolbox items are still missing after you perform these steps, you can delete the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version> _<instance-id> folder to fully reset your Visual Studio settings.

For Visual Studio 2015 and older:

1. Close Visual Studio.
2. Open the “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0” (Windows 7+) folder and remove all .TBD files.
3. Run the “regedit” tool. For this, click the “Run” item in the Start menu and type “regedit” without quotation marks.
4. Find the “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ToolboxControlsInstaller_AssemblyFoldersExCache” and “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ToolboxControlsInstallerCache” keys.
5. Remove everything from these keys, leaving them empty.
6. Run Visual Studio again and wait until it recreates all items in the Toolbox.