Issues with WPF controls and Visual Studio Toolbox - wpf

Installing WPF Controls onto a machine is a messy task.
I tested installation in various systems including VMs. Following are the issues I have seen.
Controls not installed in the VS Toolbox.
Controls are isntalled but, cannot be dragged-n-dropped onto the WPF Window
Duplicate entries in the Toolbox sometimes!
I do not know what is wrong with the ToolboxControlsInstaller package. It messes up the Toolbox all the time, well most of the times.
Any guidelines what is the best practices to install WPF controls?
Our customers are very annoyed with these Toolbox behaviors.
Any help is welcome!
Regars,
-Datte

Our customers were annoyed too.
So I wrote this tutorial article covering toolbox installation once and for all:
Visual Studio Toolbox Control Integration
The most convenient approach seems to be using the Toolbox Controls Installer (TCI) package already pre-installed in VS2010 and newer. This includes just adding a key in registry, i.e.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ToolboxControlsInstaller\SampleControl, Version=3.7.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3cc4c7b61201d46c
You can also specify a custom tab name.
If you don't have a custom installer for your components, wrapping the DLLs in a VSI or VSIX package may be convenient. The VSIX is more powerful, support quiet install, custom tab name and uninstallation, but only VS2010 or newer.
Be careful with registry + VS2012. I discussed how the registry should be updated for VS2012, or simply call:
devenv.exe /ResetSkipPkgs
and then
devenv.exe /Setup
To clear things up.
Sometimes one also have to clear the Toolbox cache (TBD files), which seems to be a quite evil thing!

How do you install WPF controls into toolbox? However, these are all common issues with Visual Studio toolbox if you(or someone while installing other components) have done some mistakes in configuring. Refer the below links which has suggestions to avoid these issues.
Installing controls to VS 2010 procedure : How to add my custom WPF control to the ToolBox by using the WPF ToolBox Control template
Icons messed up issue : Visual studio 2005 toolbox icons messed up (though this is not reported with VS 2010, this solution would work for VS 2010 also).

Related

MVVM Light templates not showing in "Add Item" menu (VS 2017)?

I've installed MVVM Light Toolkit through NuGet in VS 2017. The problem is that when I click "Add New Item" on any project, I don't see any MVVM templates that appear in MVVM Light tutorials.
They must look like this (but I don't see them in my project):
http://prntscr.com/n9bs1q
I found similar questions about VS 2012. The answers advise to search for C:\Program Files (x86)\Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)\Mvvm Light Toolkit\Vsix
But I have no such folder not in Program Files (x86), neither in Program Files.
Help me please, what should I do for the templates to appear?
MVVM Light NuGet can only add related resources (assemblies/.cs files) into the project. It wont add Templates into Visual Studio. To get templates in Visual Studio, you have to install MVVM Light Visual Studio Extension by following the below steps.
Open Visual Studio and go to Tools->Extensions and Updates.
In the Extensions and Updates window lick Online in the left pane.
In the search bar, type MVVM Light.
In the search results find MVVM Light for VS2017. Click Download and accept license.
Extension will be installed once Visual Studio gets restarted. Then you can get the templates.
UPDATE:
They have stopped support of Item Templates for MVVM Light in Visual Studio 2017. Its been there up to VS 2015. So you can only get Project Templates (File->New Project) in VS 2017 extension. You can see similar queries here.

Unable to add WPF controls to the toolbox in Visual Studio 2013

First of all, I am completely new to Visual Studio, so please don't be too judgmental. I have a project I need to do in C# for my studies and my team uses a GitHub repository. I am in charge of creating the GUI and I am stuck at the very beggining.
I want to create the main application window using WPF, but when I use toolbox > choose items, I can not see the WPF tab. Also, when I am trying to enable the designer view, nothing happens.
Is it perhaps the software version being Visual Studio Community 2013 causing the issue? Do I need to have the Visual Studio Professional version in order to use WPF toolbox?
I'm attaching a link to the screen of the situation below.
As I presumed, all I needed was the professional version of Visual Studio. After obtaining and installing it everything works fine.

WPF Application template is missing

My VS2010 install has WPF Browser application project template, and WPF User Control lib template, but no WPF Application template. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
For me I was missing ProjectTypeGuids in the .csproj file (a new project worked for me so just compared the project files), so if you add this to the .csproj file under PropertyGroup I then had all the WPF types available for adding:
<ProjectTypeGuids>{60dc8134-eba5-43b8-bcc9-bb4bc16c2548};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
This is kind of an old question, but I just hit the same issue and found the answer after the above didn't help, so....the solution for me was that I had to select a higher framework version (4.0) before the WPF Application template I was looking for became visible. If you find that you don't have the WPF or other project templates you expect available, you may want to check that you've selected the approriate framework version from the drop-down list immediately to the right of the "Recent Templates" label in the Add New Project dialog (it's near the top-left of the dialog in question).
This issue is a lot older than Visual Studio 2010. It goes back to 2005 at least. Lucky you, I was missing the New Class template once.
According to a bunch of sources, this trick works:
If you are missing a template that comes with your installation, run devenv.exe with the /installvstemplates switch.
You'll need to exit out of all Visual Studio instances for this to work.
The trick is mentioned in the MSDN documentation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0fyc0azh.aspx
Thread on the issue in a previous version of Visual Studio: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/8a5ae9e3-be7b-493d-831c-1e49e8103f26/
I wound up uninstalling and reinstalling my Visual Studio entirely but this trick probably would have fixed my problem.
Just had this in VS2017 Community Edition. This discreet message to add missing templates helped me:
In VS 2017
Make sure that you have .Net Desktop Tools checked in you VS
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/44429/missing-wpf.html
For .NET 5 (or newer) is needed to have in .csproj in xml path Project/PropertyGroup:
<UseWPF>true</UseWPF>

Reset VS2010 Project Templates?

I installed Blend 4 RC recently but strangely it deleted some of my VS2010 projects templates, including the most important ones being Silverlight User Control and Silverlight Application.
Does anybody know how to get back these templates or tell VS2010 to reset all templates?
A bit frustrating, I'm having to create projects on my laptop then copy them to my desktop manually :(
No matter, I just reinstalled SL4 Tools and I've got my templates back once more.
Blend 4 RC also confused VS2010 on my machine, causing the WPF UserControl template to disappear. I don't use the SL4 Tools, so solved the problem on my machine by placing the template from Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\WPF\1033 in My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#\WPF.
A better solution is also described here.

If Visual Studio 2010 based on WPF, why I cannot open it with reflector?

If Visual Studio 2010 based on WPF, why I cannot open it with reflector?
In other words, devenv.exe seems to be native assembly, so where is the WPF UI code?
The Visual Studio devenv.exe executable is indeed a native program. However, native programs can load the .NET runtime and thereby host Windows Forms and WPF components. In fact, Visual Studio has always done this. Even before VS2010 adopted WPF for its editor and shell, the various Visual Studio designers were implemented in Windows Forms. If you go into the Common7\IDE and Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies directories, you'll find lots of designer DLLs that you can view in Reflector (e.g. Microsoft.VisualStudio.ORDesigner.Dsl.dll is the LINQ to SQL designer).
So the new WPF bits of Visual Studio are just another set of managed assemblies hosted in the native executable. I'm not sure which particular assemblies host the WPF bits -- and to be honest there are probably dozens. But looking at the VS process in the debugger, I'd say Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editor.dll (which lives in the GAC, not in the VS install directory) would be a good place to start.

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