WTF happened to my toolbox? Mobile controls vanished :(

Man being developer is great but days like this make you want to become a plumber :(

For some reason when I opened my "Smart Device" solution today and tried to use the forms designer all the mobile controls had vanished from the toolbox. In their place were normal WinForms controls. I'm using Visual Studio 2008.

I've even tried starting a new Smart Device project but it always comes up with the desktop controls. It works fine if I start a new project targeting .Net 2.0 but if I target 3.5 the problem appears. It doesn't make any difference which version of Windows Mobile I choose. I've tried 5.0 and 6.0.

After about 7 hours of struggling with this I'm really getting desperate (I'm even on the phone to Microsoft) so any help appreciated.

I've tried:

- resetting the toolbox

- deleting the hidden toolbox files (http://weimenglee.blogspot.com/2007/12/tip-missing-controls-in-toolbox-visual.html)

- resetting VS using the following command: "devenv.exe /setup /resetuserdata"

- resetting it using "cmd /c start /wait devenv /setup /resetuserdata /selfreg /resetskippkgs"

- punching the monitor

Thanks a lot

Chee开发者_开发百科rs

Mark

Update: I tried going back to an earlier System Restore point. Didn't help :(

---

Try forcing studio to rebuild it's resource metadata by the following command:

devenv /setup

You might also try resetting skip packages (in case for some reason it's been set to skip the CF toolbox stuff):

devenv /resetskippkgs

Run these when Studio is not running

---

In the end I uninstalled VS2008 and all Mobile SDKs, 3rd party controls and anything else related to VS2008. Reinstalled it all and it's working. Bit of a faff :(

---

I just faced the same problem after I uninstalled ".NET Compact Framework 2.0" since I only wanted to use the 3.5.

Reinstalling ".NET Compact Framework 2.0" (which I downloaded here (Official Microsoft Download Center)) fixed it for me.