MrDave's (David Yack) WebLog

Visual Studio 2005 Custom Controls in Toolbox

 Looks like registering custom controls on the toolbox has been improved dramatically in Visual Studio 2005!

 

Prior to 2005 if you had projects in your solution that had custom controls you would still have to register them with Toolbox to get them to appear.  This also caused locking and contention issues on the output from those projects when visual studio held locks on the file.

 

Now in Visual Studio 2005 when you have a project in your solution that has custom controls they appear in the toolbox without any user intervention!  This is great because now you can simply drag and drop your controls onto your pages / forms without having to deal with the old issues.  Each project that has controls adds a tab in the toolbox and then each control is listed inside that tab.

 

This is a great extra incentive if you haven’t tried building a custom control to give it a try – even if you just extend one of the built-in controls to get started.

 

It’s always fun exploring a new version and finding all the little fixes to things that drove you crazy in the old version!

 

Posted: Sep 01 2004, 09:11 AM by MrDave | with 7 comment(s)

Comments

Erion said:

Hi ,

I have a control in dll, which want to use in one of my projects. I have added the reference to the dll, but the toolbox doesn't show the control. Any Ideas ?

# June 7, 2007 5:54 PM

JOB said:

Have you tried adding the control from the toolbox instead? Right-click on the toolbox and select 'Choose Items...'. I've added some custom controls this way and VS2005 automatically adds references to the controls in the 'references' folder.

# October 8, 2007 9:49 AM

KASH said:

The comment was helpul

# November 20, 2007 1:55 AM

Ivan said:

I'm starting to think this "feature" doesn't work.  At least, it only works half of the time.  Sometimes my custom controls show up on the toolbar, sometimes they don't.   Adding it to the toolbox manually only brings problems later, when I change my solution, and recompile i have caching issues with the controls.

# March 17, 2008 3:25 PM

Mike said:

It works but you have to build the project before they appear in the form designer.

it isn'y DLL that have been referenced that auto populate just controls that are in the open projects

so as an example add a user control to your app, build it, then that user control is now available to be dragged and dropped into the application

# December 19, 2008 9:13 AM

archana said:

hi

i am doing one project called video conferencing in asp.net with c#. if any one have code kindly send me to my mail id...

ballapuramarchana@gmail.com

thanks

# March 11, 2009 2:47 AM

comecme said:

I can't get this to work. I create a new ASP.NET Web Application project. Then I add a ASP.NET Server Control project. I build the solution. Then, when I go to the Default.aspx page, the Toolbox does NOT show the newly created ServerControl1 control

Am I understanding correctly that the steps mentioned should make the ServerControl1 appear on the toolbox automatically?

# July 20, 2009 6:03 AM
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