I'm working on a solution that contains multiple projects targeting Windows Mobile 5 and standard Windows applications.
Lately when opening up a form in designer the common UI controls (textbox, button, label, etc etc...) have vanished leaving only the controls defined within the project.
Resetting the toolbox has no effect. A google search suggested deleting the toolbox temp files in the Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0, however this was only successful in bringing back the default controls for Windows Mobile 5. The WinForms controls are still mysteriously missing.
Also, if I right-click and Select All on the toolbox, all of the WinForms controls do in fact come up, however they're all grayed out.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I just had a similiar problem. In a managed C++ project all the default toolbox items disappeared form the winforms designer. After playing around for a while I found that there was a problem in the .vcproj file.
<VisualStudioProject
ProjectType="Visual C++"
Version="9,00"
Name="COLLADA Import"
ProjectGUID="{0DEEF9B6-1929-44E3-92EC-13712839FB63}"
RootNamespace="COLLADAImport"
Keyword="ManagedCProj"
TargetFrameworkVersion="0"
>
When you set TargetFrameworkVersion to a valid number, for example 131072 for .Net 2.0, the toolbox items will be back.
If you right click on the Toolbox and select 'Choose Items...' and then sort by the 'Namespace' column, you can then select the ones you need (for example System.Windows.Forms for WinForms).
You can multiselect with Shift and then select/deselect the group.
The controls then reappear in the Toolbox as enabled.
I've noticed this exact same thing for regular WinForms as well. I can't speak to mobile applications but in regular winforms this has a tendency to happen.
I believe it's actually a bug in Visual Studio.
There are some things you can do (again, for WinForms. I'm not sure about mobile) with adding attributes to your control. Such as:
[ToolboxBitmap(typeof(MyControl), "MyControlBitmap")]
There are some other useful related things on this site:
http://en.csharp-online.net/Design-Time_Integration-Attributes
I had exactly the same problem (after installing Windows Mobile SDK all items in the toolbox were greyed out).
I've startet the Visual Studio 2008 command line as administrator and started the following command (WARNING - all your settings are lost !!)
devenv /setup /resetuserdata /selfreg /resetskippkgs
After that the toolbox looked fine and worked like on the first day.
The idea came from this thread: connect.microsoft.com
Go to the Tools menu and choose import & export settings, then choose the 'reset all' setting, then yes. Save your current settings, after that you'll have your toolbox reappear.
Actually you may be able to add a registry key to get this to work also.
Make sure you're not in Debug mode.
If you are running Visual Studio 2008 under vista, try running it as an Administrator. Right click on the shortcut and select Run as Administrator.
Well guess what install Service pack 1 for VS 2008 and it would go away and if you have wireless mouse and keyboard turn it off. Choose one of these two both work.
Related
I've been encountering this issue ever since I bought this laptop with 4k display in 2015. With a lot of effort I managed to work around the issue but I'm growing tired of it.
VS2017 is supposedly DPI aware hence I do not expect any issues when creating a simple MDI Parent Form and running the app. But to my frustration the icons in the toolStrip (just the standard one in the MDI parent form) are scaled horribly.
When I create a form with a button on it which looks just fine in Visual Studio 2017 designer and I run the app and load the form, the button text isn't completely shown.
My display settings are as follows:
Resolution: 3840x2160
Scaled 250% (in display settings) because at 100% everything is unreadable
I've tried to find solutions, but the only workable thing I could find was setting my visual studio designer to dpi-unaware via registry (link here)
Help anyone?
Update When I add a new MDI form with the setting of DPI-awareness OFF, everything looks OK except Visual Studio itself (blurry).
I have similar problem when working with Windows Forms (Windows Forms Designer) on Visual Studio 2017, but I think it would be the same on Visual Studio 2019.
From Microsoft documentation here, there is a tip to disable the scaling/DPI aware feature.
If you prefer to manage settings from the command line, devenv.exe
takes /noscale as a command-line parameter to run in 100% scaling
mode.
So, basically, I just created a shortcut on the Desktop to Visual Studio (devenv.exe) and added the parameter /noscale on the shortcut Target field like so:
"...\path\to\IDE\devenv.exe" /noscale
So, everytime Visual Studio is started through the shortcut, it will always start with 100% scaling mode. If you use high resolution screen (high-dpi) screen, you will notice that the Visual Studio text will appear a little bit blurry because of this.
You should change the settings so there won't be a difference when the program runs on different machines.
Go to the project's properties page, then to Manifest Tool and then Input and Output. Change the DPI awareness to 'none'
When dragging a control from the toolbox and dropping it in the Windows Forms designer, a message box appears with the message Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
After closing the message box, I can drop the control on the form without any other issue.
This happens on a new project as well. The error appears in both VS 2015 and 2017 (both community editions).
EDIT : This happens on any control, including custom ones. This started happening after I updated to the latest version of Windows 10 (17134.48).
Instead of dragging and dropping, Clicking on the control, then clicking on the form is the workaround working for me until they come out with a newer update.
This is new behavior as of Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.8.6 for me.
Hopefully this will help others that just kept dragging and dropping over and over like I was doing :-)
Experiencing the same issue on Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019 Version 16.5.0. I found that I was not able to drag and drop controls while VS was open on my high DPI external monitor, but if I moved VS to my native laptop monitor, I was able to drag and drop the controls.
For Visual Studio 2017 I did not fix the problem, but I found a workaround:
went to C:\Users\user.name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_e3603226
deleted all *.tbd, privateregistry.bin*, ApplicationPrivateSettings.xml files
deleted all files in ComponentModelCache folder
restarted Visual Studio as Administrator
it showed a message of updating the MEF files
drag and drop is NOT working. It keeps throwing the same error
BUT I can click on the item I want in the toolbox and then click on the designer without dragging and it works.
For Visual Studio 2015 I did not fix the problem, but I found a workaround:
went to C:\Users\user.name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0
deleted all *.tbd, *.lock, devenv.exe.config files
deleted all files in ComponentModelCache folder
restarted Visual Studio as Administrator
drag and drop is NOT working. It keeps throwing the same error
BUT I can click on the item I want in the toolbox and then click on the designer without dragging and it works.
I have also seen the same problem repeated today in Visual Studio 2019 (Today is June 27 2019). I am trying out the VS 2017 solution from CristisS (above). I have verified that the 'workaround' still throws the exception, however, you can immediately draw the tool onto the form.
I repeatedly run into the same issue. Seems to always be caused by running the Windows Forms designer on my secondary monitor. I don't know what causes it to misbehave, but moving Windows Forms Designer window back to my laptop screen always fixes the issue. Idk if it has something to do with scaling, or what, but it is a very repeatable issue that needs to be addressed.
Moving Visual Studio over from my hi res secondary monitor to my primary laptop monitor did fix the issue.
To use Visual Studio on my larger secondary monitor, I set my secondary monitor from 3840x2160 down to 2560x1440 and set scaling from 150% down to 100%
This lets me Drag and drop from the toolbox to the designer in Visual Studio 2019 (V16.11.3) without issue again.
I found two solutions, to this problem that they worked for my WPF project in VS2015
solution 1) Click on the icon "enable/disable project code" in the bottom of windows design(the last icon near the percentual of zoom)-->Put Disable.
solution 2) Dx mouse button on your file .xaml and apply your modify in blend , selecting the "Open in Blend..." menu.
That's all
Daniel.
Has anyone else experience incredibly slow performance in the XAML editor in VS 2010? If I have a new project with a limited number of files, the performance is fine. However, if I have a project with a larger number of XAML files, the XAML editor hangs intermittently every few seconds, making it almost impossible to use.
I should also note that the performance is only slow in one particular project where I am referencing DevExpress 2010. I am not certain if this is related.
Any suggestions on solutions to this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Chris
In Visual Studio 2012:
Go to
Tools > Options > TextEditor > XAML > Misc
Check Always open documents in XAML view and uncheck Automatically populate toolbox items.
In Visual Studio 2015, 2017:
Go to
Tools > Options > XAML Designer
uncheck Automatically populate toolbox items.
This fixed my same problem.
If you don't need the visual designer, you can select a different editor in visual studio:
Right click the xaml file -> Open With... -> Source Code (Text) Editor
You will only lose the split view, intellisense etc. should still work.
If you need to check something in the designer you can still click 'view designer' to open the normal XAML editor again.
If you want to improve the performance of the visual designer, try checking DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode in your code-behind. The visualiser instantiates your controls to know how to display them, thus executing parts of the code-behind.
Like the OP, I had extreme lag in the xaml editor on a project that relied heavily on DevExpress WPF controls. After trying unsuccessfully to resolve this issue with the other solutions posted here, I eventually tried deleting my Solution User Options (.suo) file, which is usually located in the same folder as the solution (.sln) file. This immediately resolved the issue. You may want to read this post about what visual studio stores in the suo file so you can reset anything important (such as build configuration - mine always defaults the active solution platform back to "Mixed Platforms" for example)
Short answer: if you do not use designer much, just replace the default editor for XAML, thus getting rid of XAML visual designer and speeding things up. Right click any XAML file, click Open with... and choose another default editor. Source code (text) editor works just fine.
Now it should be already fine. If you want to understand the details and completely get rid of the slow designer, read the long answer.
Long answer: Here is a nice explanation of what happens and why is it that slow.
A brief todo based on the aforementioned article in order to completely disable the visual designer of XAML:
Under Tools->Options->Text Editor->XAML->Miscellaneous->Default View check Always open documents in full XAML view
Open Task manager and end XAML Designer process XDesProc.exe (Note: for VS2013 right click this process and go to containing folder. Rename the exe to sth else, than end the process)
Standard XAML editor will load this process again (I guess it will not succeed with VS2013 and actions done in P.2). However, right click any XAML file, Open with... and choose another default editor. Source code (text) editor works just fine.
While using dev express, I've noticed some laggy response in the Visual Studio designer. This appears to be due to the license authentication of the DevExpress products.
If you delete the "Licenses.Licx" file (found in the project properties folder) you'll notice a marked improvement in performance.
Note: Removing the license file doesn't stop you from using DevExpress controls. But it does stop VS from constantly authenticating it.
I'm a big fan of the rather obscure "Document Outline" window in VS 2008 (it's buried in the View -> Other Windows menu).
It's the only way I know to get a view of the containment heirarchy for a complicated WinForm that has a lot of nested controls.
Some months ago, this just stopped working for the most complicated form in my WinForms project. Now it just displays "There are no items to show for the selected document", no matter what I select in the designer.
No clue as to what broke it - the form contains a mix of common MS controls and some third party controls (mainly DevExpress). Several SplitContainers, but Document Outline originally had no problem with these.
Anybody else seen this, and any suggestions on how to fix it?
After some poking around, I solved the problem myself.
I just started deleting controls from the form, to see what would happen.
Turns out the 3rd party grid I'm using caused the problem - when I reconfigured it, the problem went away. (Looks like a bug in the control, which I've reported to the vendor).
Interesting...misbehaving controls can break the VS IDE, not just your apps.
This has happened repeatedly on various machines in VS2008 and Visual C# 2008.
I create an XBAP appliation.
I click the green arrow and it works.
I click Build/Publish and publish it to either a website or folder, it works.
I make some changes, publish again, and I just get a white screen. Both browsers, can restart, always blank.
It seems to be some kind of caching, etc. Has anyone had this happen to them and found a workaround?
Is the version number incrementing? Right click on the xbap project, go to properties/publish tab, increase the version number and republish.
You can clear the application store using mage -cc command from VS command prompt. Check out this post for more info.