[RESOLVED] Unable to add Custom Controls to Toolbox

[warrenayen]

Hello everyone. Returning to the forum after quite some time!

I'm currently working on a very large project for one of our clients. We have two solutions: our database back-end of projects and the control framework, and the front-end, which contains all of the forms, user controls, and reporting in about 30 projects.

I have auto-populate turned on, so whenever I view a designer, all of the controls for each project are displayed in their own tab. In addition, in the General tab, every control from our shared framework in the back-end solution (so uniquely named "shared.dll") are added and available for use. This allows me to add our specific components, such as the PTextBox, PPanel, PNumericTextBox, and so on to our front-end. These controls support special functionality for other components, such as property change notification or limits on input. I personally added these to the General Tab years ago.

Recently the toolbox reset itself for reasons unknown. When I tried to add our components to the box by selecting the DLL from the bin\Debug folder, they wouldn't appear! Resetting the toolbox fixed the problem, and they stayed in the General tab for a few more months.

As of yesterday, this all changed. They're gone again, and now nothing brings them back. Nothing. I've reset my PC. I've restarted Visual Studio. I've reset the toolbox and ran the repair function to no avail. I'm now reduced to copying and pasting those components from other components in order to use them on new forms or controls.

Any ideas?

[warrenayen]

Well obviously no one else figured out the issue but we did.

We are using 2.0 for this project as it has to run on legacy systems. However, we need to convert TIFF images from a scanner into JPG and back for sending to Check 21 ICL. That required using 3.5 in one of the projects. Due to this, 2.0 projects were unable to see the controls from projects that referenced that 3.5 project (as they were converted to 3.5), and thus nothing from that project would appear in the tab.

We've corrected it and the issue is resolved. Hopefully others who run across this issue will discover the same fix.