Resolved Visual Studio 2019 Toolbox Woes

cbreemer

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 1, 2021
Messages
184
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10+
I love Visual Studio, but the Toolbox totally freaks me out. It's now the third time that suddenly it was empty for no good reason. IIRC the first two I got it back by using Reset Toolbox, the second time by updating Visual Studio. This time it seems well and truly shot. Windows Update, VS Update, Reset Toolbox, Reset in "Choose Items", nothing helps. To be precise, after Reset Toolbox the tools are all shown, but all greyed out. Have others here had this issue and know a way to fix it ? Googling I saw a lot of posts describing the same issue but none of the suggestions worked for me. How is it even possible that such a slick and high-quality IDE can have such an incomprehensible crumware toolbox ?
I'll probably end up re-installing VS2019 but was hoping for some easier way...
 
Solution
Upon first time starting VS ("cold start"), after previously opened documents have been restored, I often (not always) find the toolbox empty for a designer view. Properties window is also empty when selecting different controls.
Sometimes I then have to switch to a code view and back for toolbox to fill, other times I need to close the designer view and reopen it. It has been like that, and still is, at least for VS 2019 and 2022.
This only happens for winforms .Net Framework projects from what I can see. For example for a winforms .Net 6 I will first see a "waiting for intellisense to finish initializing" then "loading designer" before design view appears, so I suspect loading designer for winforms framework is buggy when VS has a lot...
How is it even possible that such a slick and high-quality IDE can have such an incomprehensible crumware toolbox ?
Because WinForms is so 2005. The WinForms Designer was buggy back then, and probably still is. When WPF came along, MS pretty much just left WinForms on life support and expecting it to eventually die off. All the original .NET Core plans called for WinForms to not be supported anymore, so no real investments or efforts were going there except for any reports of security issues. It was only recently that MS was forced to continue support for WinForms in .NET Core because of overwhelming pressure from large companies which had a lot of in-house line-of-business apps written in WinForms, and no easy path to migrate to WPF, Xamarin, or WinUI -- basically people would have to start from scratch. Even MS saying that they've been telling WinForms users for over 15 years that WinForms was going to be out of support didn't fly.

(My guess is that is because the same people who were mid-level managers in these large companies who pushed for WinForms for in house apps back in the early 2000's are now top level executives, and it would be egg on their face to have selected a dead-end technology, and so they pressured MS to continue support. That's just me speculating, though.)

Personally, after losing many hour of work and/or fighting with the WinForms Designer, by 2007 I chose to just exclusively build my forms and controls by hand instead of using the designer.
 
Because WinForms is so 2005. The WinForms Designer was buggy back then, and probably still is. When WPF came along, MS pretty much just left WinForms on life support and expecting it to eventually die off. All the original .NET Core plans called for WinForms to not be supported anymore, so no real investments or efforts were going there except for any reports of security issues. It was only recently that MS was forced to continue support for WinForms in .NET Core because of overwhelming pressure from large companies which had a lot of in-house line-of-business apps written in WinForms, and no easy path to migrate to WPF, Xamarin, or WinUI -- basically people would have to start from scratch. Even MS saying that they've been telling WinForms users for over 15 years that WinForms was going to be out of support didn't fly.

(My guess is that is because the same people who were mid-level managers in these large companies who pushed for WinForms for in house apps back in the early 2000's are now top level executives, and it would be egg on their face to have selected a dead-end technology, and so they pressured MS to continue support. That's just me speculating, though.)

Personally, after losing many hour of work and/or fighting with the WinForms Designer, by 2007 I chose to just exclusively build my forms and controls by hand instead of using the designer.
What are you talking about?
He's got an issue with the VS IDE, since VS2010 and newer are all WPF apps what does your winforms rant even have to do with this?
 
Upon first time starting VS ("cold start"), after previously opened documents have been restored, I often (not always) find the toolbox empty for a designer view. Properties window is also empty when selecting different controls.
Sometimes I then have to switch to a code view and back for toolbox to fill, other times I need to close the designer view and reopen it. It has been like that, and still is, at least for VS 2019 and 2022.
This only happens for winforms .Net Framework projects from what I can see. For example for a winforms .Net 6 I will first see a "waiting for intellisense to finish initializing" then "loading designer" before design view appears, so I suspect loading designer for winforms framework is buggy when VS has a lot to start up.

1640512703467.png
1640512720611.png
 
Solution
Because WinForms is so 2005. The WinForms Designer was buggy back then, and probably still is. When WPF came along, MS pretty much just left WinForms on life support and expecting it to eventually die off. All the original .NET Core plans called for WinForms to not be supported anymore, so no real investments or efforts were going there except for any reports of security issues. It was only recently that MS was forced to continue support for WinForms in .NET Core because of overwhelming pressure from large companies which had a lot of in-house line-of-business apps written in WinForms, and no easy path to migrate to WPF, Xamarin, or WinUI -- basically people would have to start from scratch. Even MS saying that they've been telling WinForms users for over 15 years that WinForms was going to be out of support didn't fly.

(My guess is that is because the same people who were mid-level managers in these large companies who pushed for WinForms for in house apps back in the early 2000's are now top level executives, and it would be egg on their face to have selected a dead-end technology, and so they pressured MS to continue support. That's just me speculating, though.)

Personally, after losing many hour of work and/or fighting with the WinForms Designer, by 2007 I chose to just exclusively build my forms and controls by hand instead of using the designer.
Thanks for your reply. Yes your feelings towards the VS designer are well known in these forums. Personally I never had a problem with it (except for this damn Toolbox) but then I'm hardly a power user. I'm sure it was buggy at some stage, but it seems very likely that the quality may have improved some since 2007 😉
As for WinForms, I've been vaguely aware there was an alternative but I never bothered to look into them because I like WinForms, am comfortable with it and don't need any new fancy stuff . I never knew MS was trying to make this obsolete - I hope they don't.
 
But any chance do you have any of your custom controls added into the toolbox? Or any Telerik controls? For your controls, make sure that they are fully built and blue in some funky non-compiling state. As for Telerik controls, the only thing I found back then was to uninstall and reinstall the entire Telerik suite after doing a repair or reinstall of VS.
 
What are you talking about?
He's got an issue with the VS IDE, since VS2010 and newer are all WPF apps what does your winforms rant even have to do with this?
The toolbox is in the VS IDE when WinForms Designer is used. As I recall CBreemer prefers WinForms over WPF.
 
Upon first time starting VS ("cold start"), after previously opened documents have been restored, I often (not always) find the toolbox empty for a designer view. Properties window is also empty when selecting different controls.
Sometimes I then have to switch to a code view and back for toolbox to fill, other times I need to close the designer view and reopen it. It has been like that, and still is, at least for VS 2019 and 2022.
This only happens for winforms .Net Framework projects from what I can see. For example for a winforms .Net 6 I will first see a "waiting for intellisense to finish initializing" then "loading designer" before design view appears, so I suspect loading designer for winforms framework is buggy when VS has a lot to start up.

View attachment 1927 View attachment 1928
That was eminently useful JohnH ! It seems to have fixed the issue, many thanks !! I now notice that items are grayed out in the 'Standard' section, but available in the 'Common Controls' section. It's possible I had just not looked closely enough, I find this plethora of Toolbox sections extremely confusing, having e.g. no clue what the difference between 'Standard' and 'Common' is. Anyway I found I could move 'Common Control' to the top, and it's well filled so I'm all happy again 😊
 
But any chance do you have any of your custom controls added into the toolbox? Or any Telerik controls? For your controls, make sure that they are fully built and blue in some funky non-compiling state. As for Telerik controls, the only thing I found back then was to uninstall and reinstall the entire Telerik suite after doing a repair or reinstall of VS.
Thanks but no, I used only standard controls, plus a few added later like AcrobatReader, Webbrowser etc. No funky stuff anywhere.
 
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