Speed Up the Visual Studio Toolbox

Thursday, July 23, 2009

There are plenty of tips out on the web that I see no need to repeat here. But this one made such a remarkable difference on my box that I had to post it….

I use the Auto-Hide property on the Toolbox to preserve screen real-estate. After adding the Ajax control toolkit to my environment, the Visual Studio Toolbox started to really drag. Instead of popping up quickly, the hard disk would churn for several seconds and the Toolbox would struggle, agonizingly and with apparently great reluctance, to appear.

When it did eventually appear, random sections of the Toolbox would be open. It didn't remember which tab was last used. Assuming the logic is in a background thread, I can only assume the thread was poorly written. If it was tested, the test results were ignored.

Thank goodness for the TooboxAutoPopulate setting.

Tools->Options->Windows Forms Designer->General

Setting AutoToolboxPopulate to False brought my machine back from the abyss of lost productivity caused by slow, clunky, energy-sapping GUI delays. Although the setting is under Windows Forms Designer, it is just as effective for ASP.Net developers (it's the same Toolbox).

I hope someone finds this helpful.

Steve Wellens

9 Comments

oh god, thanks a lot man. this just freaked me out for a looooong time.

eric.castoldi - Thursday, July 23, 2009 8:58:35 AM

Very nice! Thanks!!

Jose Rolando Guay Paz - Thursday, July 23, 2009 9:54:19 AM

This auto toolbox population is really annoying. Thank you for showing me how to disable it.

Nam - Thursday, July 23, 2009 12:08:51 PM

OK. So what is the drawback? I don't see newly available controls?

Dave - Thursday, July 23, 2009 2:21:22 PM

Drawbacks?

If you include a custom built control in your project, it will not show up automatically on the toolbox (as least that's what the documenation says).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fw694kde(VS.80).aspx

SGWellens - Thursday, July 23, 2009 3:23:53 PM

Thank you for the tip :).

http://www.notechsoft.com - Saturday, July 25, 2009 5:42:55 AM

Really cool trick , it added some speed to my Slow PC :)

Zeeshan Umar - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 1:41:00 AM

My visual studio was dead slow and I was searching tips to make it faster. A million thanks for sharing this.

Santhosh from Agile virtual - Monday, October 11, 2010 10:50:29 PM

I had an issue when switching to Design View, VS was hanging. This did the trick.

Thanks.

Riedoh Salie - Friday, August 5, 2011 4:56:44 AM

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