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VS 2005 Toolbox Refreshing

Hi,

I have noticed that the toolbox in VS 2005 contains a tab for every projects in my solution that contains a component derived class. During builds of the solutions each of these tabs are being refreshed / rebuild and it can take a little time.

Is there anyway of stopping this refresh, or is it a matter of removing the tab from the toolbox? Maybe this is a bug that has been fixed post Beta 2?

Thanks for your help

Graham

[434 byte] By [Gravy] at [2008-2-4]

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# 1

I have noticed the same thing, and it is very annoying. I have a lot of User Controls in our various projects and it doubles our build time just by refreshing the Toolbox with every time I run the project.

Did you (or anybody) find a solution to stop this refreshing?

Thanks,
Mark

Messex at 2007-9-8 >

top of Msdn Tech,Windows Forms,Windows Forms Designer...

# 2

We have a lot of UserControls in our application, and with VS2005, it
apparently automatically adds UserControls to the Toolbox when you compile a
project. Problem is, since it is our main EXE, every time we do build, it
removes and re-adds every one of these user controls to the toolbox. This
takes a long time, and we have to sit there and wait every time we run our
application in VS. This is very annoying. Does anybody know a way to turn
off the 'automatic' adding of the User Controls to the Toolbox. I am sure
in some cases this would be a nice feature, but for us, it is killing us.

Thanks,
Mark

Messex at 2007-9-8 >

# 3

I would searchthe VS 2005 feedback site and see if somebody has posted and if so vote for it. Otherwise put it in as a suggestion.

MarcD at 2007-9-8 >

# 4

Where might I find the feedback site - do you have a link?
Thanks,
Mark

Messex at 2007-9-8 >

# 5

I don't believe the feature exist, however a work around for your delima is to put all of your user controls in a project outside that of your exe. Rebuild the control project only when neccessary...it is after the controls are built that the tool box is updated with the new build.

DMan1 at 2007-9-8 >

# 6

See this post:

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=71971

DMan1 at 2007-9-8 >

# 7

Thanks for the idea. However, it is a little more complicated than that. We have a 3rd-party control that does the 'Visual Studio-like' Tabs. We are using it to build a 'SDI-like' interface, with the tabs to allow multiple windows to be open. Similar to visual Studio. Anyway, they highly recommend that we use UserControls (instead of Forms) to do this, because of 'special issues' when inheriting regular forms for their tab control - something about the container, etc.

Anyway, that means all of our forms are really 'user controls'. So, it doesn't help us to move them, as we are working on the UI code now, so that assembly would have to be rebuilt all the time.

I just can't believe you can't turn that feature off. It is extremely annoying when you have 50 'forms' in your application, and this happens every time.

One question - Even if I don't change anything, and hit the 'run' button, it does (or appear to do) a full build. Is there somewhere that I can change that? Many times I only need to build one project in my solution, but it builds them all. That might help with performance.

Thanks again.

Mark

Messex at 2007-9-8 >

# 8

Here is a link for product feed back:

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/

DMan1 at 2007-9-8 >

# 9

DMan1 wrote:
See this post:
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=71971

A circular reference eh? :P

MarcD at 2007-9-8 >

# 10

There is a switch you can use to disable this behavior.

In VS 2005 go to the Tools->Options menu. There is a "Windows Forms Desginer" tab. In that tab under the "Toolbox" category is the AutoToolboxPopulate field - change it to false.

HTH,
Mike

MikeBohlander at 2007-9-8 >

# 11

Mike,

I am going to check that out first thing in the morning. If that does it, there will be a lot of happy people in our office. I asked multiple developers on my team to research it, but nobody found this.

THank you!!!

Mark
Big Smile

Messex at 2007-9-8 >

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