Keep your project and Toolbox in sync

Thursday, November 11, 2010 by VSX Team | Comments 8
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I guess the larger part of you have to maintain various projects using different versions of a Telerik suite, let’s say RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

Having in mind the above mentioned scenario, working with two projects referring different versions of the Telerik.Web.UI assembly there are the following options :

 

  1. Have parallel installs of both the RadControls versions on your machine.
    This one works fine until one day, while in a hurry, you just expand a RadControls group in your Toolbox, drag a control over your page, attempt to build the project and find it broken. The reason for the break is that you unintentionally dragged a control from the wrong Toolbox group and Visual Studio got the project reference changed to point to the “other” Telerik.Web.UI assembly.
    In addition, the embedded filtering in VS2010 hides the “older” toolbox items, so you don’t see the older assembly version. Which makes it hard to drag a control from the “older” assembly to your page/form/window.
  2. Have only the latest RadControls installed and declare the controls in your old project by code.
    This is a really good one when one wants to learn the API of a control suite, but once familiar, this approach is not much RAD, is it?

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Toolbox displayed only the set of controls used by this specific project? With the feedback we got from you, we found out that you are having lots of troubles with the Toolbox, so we decided to help avoid them.

 

Our initial research showed that while Visual Studio’s Toolbox has some filtering implemented, the mechanism is not customizable. With this finding, we searched for another option and it is now around: We implemented a new dialog in the VSExtensions, providing the ability to update the Toolbox as per your needs:

 

The Toolbox Configuration utility:

Telerik VSExtensions ToolboxConfigurator

 

With the Toolbox Configurator you can keep your Toolbox in sync with the Telerik product your project refers to. All you need is start the utility (through the Telerik menu –> RadControls for… –> Launch Toolbox Configurator), point to the version of the RadControls distribution your project uses and click Finish. The IDE will get restarted in order to refresh the Toolbox and your project will be automatically reloaded.

 

image

 

Give it a try and send us your feedback! As usual, it is most appreciated!

 

Cheers,

Erjan Gavalji

The Telerik VSXTeam

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Posted in: RadControls for Silverlight RadControls for WPF RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax Optimization VSExtensions RadControls for Winforms

8 Comments

  • Leonardo Prada 11 Nov 2010
    At last, the only feature I miss from Infragistics. GO TELERIK GO
  • Amon-Ra Mackie 13 Nov 2010
    First off thanks!  This is an important step.  However, I do have a minor criticism regarding the WPF / Silverlight controls.  There are so many (not a bad thing) in the toolbox that I have a hard time finding the correct control.  Furthermore, the toolbox configurator loads all of the "supporting controls" for lack of a better phrase.  You know, those controls that are not prefixed with "Rad". 

    Would it be possible to add more than one tab group and group the contorls by function, much like what you do in the "browse controls" page in the wpf demos? 

    Just a thought.

    Thanks!
  • Erjan Gavalji 17 Nov 2010
    @Amon-Ra Mackie:
    Thanks for the constructive criticism indeed!
    We will check the grouping with the respective product teams. In the meantime you can sort the item alphabetically (right-click the Toolbox and choose Sort Items Alphabetically)
  • Chris 25 Nov 2010
    What is this tool supposed to do?  When I run it, pick the dll version I want to use, it restarts VS.Net, and it never does anything to my toolbox.  There are still no telerik controls in there.  I was expecting it to add the telerik group to the toolbox.
  • Geoff 26 Nov 2010
    Chris, same problem here... no telerik controls in my toolbox for 2010 Q3.
  • Erjan Gavalji 29 Nov 2010
    @Chris, @Geoff, can you guys post a support ticket? We'll do our best to help.

    Cheers,
    Erjan
  • Alan Fisher 26 Jan 2011
    I can't see all of the text in the list of installations, all I see is 40 [Installation Folder] when it should show v.2010.3.1317.40 [Installation Folder] and I don't see any way to expand the dropdown. Text above the distribution list is also cut off. I have noticed this same type of behavior with the radgrid as well.
  • Andrey 01 Feb 2011
    Hi Alan,

    We are not aware of an issue like the one you describe.

    Could you open a formal support ticket and share some additional details:
    What version of Visual Studio are you using?
    What version of Windows are you using?

    We will do our best to resolve the issue on your side and improve the experience in our future releases.

    All the best,
    Andrey

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