The Issue
After installing Silverlight 5 Tools for
Visual Studio 2010 or just the RIA Services 1.0 SP2, Visual Studio 2010 starts
to add duplicates of third-party controls to the toolbox after each restart/reset
of the toolbox. After some time what we have is a huge list of controls in each
tab and the toolbox is loading very slowly. The issue has been described in
Microsoft Connect as well:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/551183/loading-toolbox-content-from-package-takes-55-seconds-or-more
The Fix
If you are already experiencing
this issue, you are aware of it and you are looking for a fast fix to try, I will not
waste your time anymore and will get right to the point.. Download the attached
.zip, extract its contents, close Visual Studio 2010 and run the extracted .bat
file. Start Visual Studio, load any project, open a file in design mode and look
at the toolbox. Repeat this sequence several times and observe if the issue is
fixed.
What it actually does?
Well, it is really
quite simple. It just removes a corrupted RIA services toolbox cache registry
entry and your local “.tbd” files.
What causes the issue?
It is very common
issue after installing Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 or just the
RIA Services 1.0 SP2 update. For some reason it results in corrupting a
Silverlight 4 RIA toolbox cache registry key located here:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ToolboxControlsInstaller_AssemblyFoldersExCache\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_Software_Microsoft_Microsoft
SDKs_Silverlight_v4.0_AssemblyFoldersEx_Ria Services v1.0 Silverlight
Libraries]
Visual Studio
is trying to load the corrupted cache, which results in an error. Then, it
tries to rebuild the cache resulting in another error which prevents it from
cleaning its previous visual state cache.
For more
information on how Visual Studio toolbox works check this post:
http://community.infragistics.com/blogs/alexander_vezenkov/archive/2012/05/02/how-visual-studio-2010-toolbox-works.aspx
