Most VS 2008 Toolbox items greyed out and cannot be used

Question

I just installed VS 2008 and the 3.5 framework AJAX toolkit. I have MIGRATED my earlier VS 2005 projects to VS 2008 and cannot use most of my Toolbox items (they are greyed out), especially the AJAX controls, on them. What is happening? I have tried adding them to the "AJAX Control Toolkit" tab many many times by adding the AjaxControlToolkit.dll file to the tab, to no avail.

**Important Note: When I attempt to create a NEW solution/project and open the Toolbox to look at the AJAX items, they are all there (not reyed) and ready to be used.

Please help me. Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Maybush1,

Welcome to MSDN forums. And thank you for your post.

As we know, by default, Visual Studio 2005 targets .NET Framework 2.0. When we convert .NET 2.0 project from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008 via the Conversion, the target Framework is still .NET 2.0.

For AJAX Control Toolkit, it's the new toolkit in ASP.NET 3.5. So if we need to use them, we should upgrade the project to .NET Framework 3.5.
To upgrade your ASP.NET project, please right click the project, select Property Pages and then under Build tag select the Target Framework.
(Note: We had better to remove all the previous references and add these reference again to keep the reference updated.)

Could you please help me to check that?

Hope this helps. If you have any concern, please feel free to let me know.

Best regards,
Yichun Chen

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Answer 2

Hi Yichun,

thank you for the reply. Sorry I didn't reply sooner; I never received a message stating that my message was replied to.

I attempted to update the project to the 3.5 framework as you outlined, closed the solution, and then reopened the solution. Unfortunately, all AJAX controls are still greyed out.

Not sure what to do at this point.

BTW, I never added any references to my project, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Frank M.

Answer 3

Hi Frank,

It doesn't matter. And thank you for your reply.

Some clarification with you:
Which edition of Visual Studio 2008 are you running now?

Based on the description of your post, you could add Ajax Items when you created a new project. Thus, the situation happened in this specific project. It seems that AJAX Control Toolkit is well installed.

(Note: We had better to remove all the previous references and add these reference again to keep the reference updated.)

Sorry for less explanation. I mean that we should remove older stuff like controls, assembly file. It would be similar to create a new Web Form to start from scratch. Then drag and drop the controls again.

Could you please have a try?

BTW, this forum is for the support of Visual Studio installation. Since your issue is related to ASP.NET, you also can try to post your thread on ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit forum. You will get more useful help there. This will make answer searching in the forum easier and be beneficial to other community members as well.

Hope this helps. If you have any concern, please feel free to let me know.

Best regards,
Yichun Chen

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Answer 4

Thanks for the reply again Yichun,

I'm sorry about posting in this location; I didn't even realize that it was not an AJAX-related thread. I must have followed some other AJAX threads to this location and then started posting to it.

I have VS 2008 SP1 Professional Edition.

I'm not sure I understand the advice very clearly. (Sorry, I'm a bit of a newbie;) Are you suggesting to open a new web project and then copy and paste the code from my previous project into it?

Thanks again Yichun,

Frank M.

Answer 5

Another reason why the tool box is greyed out is that you don't have a active doc opened. The tool box opens the only tools that are needed for the active doc

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Michael Summers

Answer 6

Hi Michael,

how can I have an active doc opened? I would think that opening my solution for the project would be all that was needed.

Thanks,

Frank

Answer 7

It's strange, but when I try to open a brand new Windows App project as well, NO controls in the toolbox are available in any tabs (they, also, are greyed out).

Frank

Answer 8

you need to go futher than opening up the solution. The menu reacts to the type of file that you open in the solution. For example if you open up a XAML file you will only see the silverlight tools on the tool box and every tool that applies to that XAML application.

I don't know about the VS 2008 Express Edition.  I use the VS 2008 Pro Edition. The way I think is they react the same way

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Michael Summers

Answer 9

Thank you for Michael's kindly help.

Hi Frank,

It doesn't matter. And thank you for your reply.

I'm not sure I understand the advice very clearly. (Sorry, I'm a bit of a newbie;) Are you suggesting to open a new web project and then copy and paste the code from my previous project into it?

I think that creating a new web project is one simple way to achieve that so that you don't need to take time to check and remove older stuff. :)

FYI:
To apply Ajax controls in VS IDE, please check the following points for more information:

Note:

 

Version 3.0.20229
2008-02-29 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit targets the official release of .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

Version 1.0.20229
You can also download the Toolkit for .NET Framework 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

Version 3.0.30930
September 30, 2009 release of the AJAX Control Toolkitfor ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Configure Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 

• Create a new web site from the ASP.NET AJAX web site template by opening the "File" menu, clicking "New", "Web Site...", and picking "ASP.NET AJAX Web Site" under "My Templates"
• Right-click on the Toolbox and select "Add Tab", and add a tab called "AJAX Control Toolkit"
• Inside that tab, right-click on the Toolbox and select "Choose Items..."
• When the "Choose Toolbox Items" dialog appears, click the "Browse..." button. Navigate to the folder where you installed the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit package. You will find a folder called "SampleWebSite", and under that another folder called "bin". Inside that folder, select "AjaxControlToolkit.dll" and click OK. Click OK again to close the Choose Items Dialog.
• You can now use the included sample controls in your web sites!

It's strange, but when I try to open a brand new Windows App project as well, NO controls in the toolbox are available in any tabs (they, also, are greyed out). 

Some clarification:
Could you please clarify "NO controls in the toolbox"? Do you mean no Ajax controls or empty toolbox?

If you mean "empty toolbox", please try the following points:

1. Try resetting the toolbox via right-click on the toolbox >> select "Reset Toolbox". Does it work?
2. Try adding controls via the following steps:
    - Right Click on Toolbox
    - Click "Choose Item..."
    - Click ".NET Framework Components"
    - Add control to your toolbox
3. Use Verifictaion tool to verify .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 on your machine.
4. Otherwise, please try:
    - run devenv /ResetSettings to isolate the Settings problem
    - run devenv /safemode to isolate potential 3rd party add-in issue
    - run devenv /ResetSkipPkgs to see if it does the trick

Hope this helps. If you have any concern, please feel free to let me know.

Best regards,
Yichun Chen

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Answer 10

Thanks Yichun,

after following your steps this time and opening a new project it finally worked! I can now use the AJAX tools.

And thank you Michael for the information.

Thanks

Answer 11

Hi Frank,

It's my pleasure!

I'm so glad to hear this good news. Cheer!

Have a great day.

Best regards,
Yichun Chen

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Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.
Welcome to the All-In-One Code Framework! If you have any feedback, please tell us.

Answer 12

Thanks Yichun,

after following your steps this time and opening a new project it finally worked! I can now use the AJAX tools.

And thank you Michael for the information.

Thanks

Your welcome my friend. I'm glad that Yichun and I could help you.

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Michael Summers