Fixing the Toolbox in Visual Studio 2005
I have had the extreme pleasure of working with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services lately (notice the extreme sarcasm in my tone). I am working on a project for a large client and one part of the project requires I enhance a report to support multiple languages. This post is not about localization but a rather strange issue I faced today.
I opened up my project in Visual Studio and proceed to open the report I needed to analyze for changes and decided to look at the controls at my disposal to help enhance the report and was greeted by this set of controls:
Interesting, all the controls are just Textbox. Obviously this isn’t right and I had to do a bit of searching around the net for a few things to try. The first suggestion I found was to right click the Toolbox and select Reset ToolBox….this had no effect. Several suggestions didn’t seem right but I finally tried one which worked. It involved a few steps:
- Shutdown Visual Studio
- Locate the directory - C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0
- Delete all files named Toolbox.* (there were 4 of them)
- Restart Visual Studio
The directory listing where the Toolbox files live looked like this:
When Visual Studio restarts it will recreate the Toolbox files based on what is installed on the system. After restarting Visual Studio my Toolbox looked like this when editing a report:
The steps are pretty trivial when you know what they are but finding the solution took a bit of spelunking but it worked like a charm. I don’t know what actually caused this to happen but I don’t have the time to find out why. If someone has the reason I would love to know why.
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