Toolbox Control Installer (TCI) in Visual Studio 2017

Question

In Visual Studio 2015 and earlier there was an easy way to add a custom control to the Toolbox by adding a registry key like the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\XX.0\ToolboxControlsInstaller

It seems not working anymore in Visual Studio 2017, am I missing something or is it a bug?

I would avoid to use VSIX to deploy my custom control and I see that some other people are trying to figure out how to solve this - see https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/2813/cant-find-registry-entries-for-visual-studio-2017.html

EDIT: It seems that it works by adding the "ToolboxControlsInstaller" registry subkey in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_xxxxxx

Is it an acceptable solution or is it only a workaround for a bug ? I mean, should it work also with the HKLM key?

Answer 1

Hi ilCosmico,

This forum discusses and asks questions about extending and integrating with Visual Studio, Since your issue is more related to visual studio general, we'll move it to vs general forum for suitable support.

Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Best regards,

Cole Wu

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Answer 2

Hi ilCosmico,

EDIT: It seems that it works by adding the "ToolboxControlsInstaller" registry subkey in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_xxxxxx.

Thanks for sharing your workaround here.

It seems that the VS2017 really changed some registry. Firstly, really thank you for sharing your workaround here, I help you report this issue to the product team here:

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/28260/toolbox-control-installer-tci-in-visual-studio-201.html

Maybe we could get more useful information for this specific issue from the product team directly.

Best Regards,

Jack

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MSDN Community Support
Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" the responses that resolved your issue, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if not. This can be beneficial to other community members reading this thread. If you have any compliments or complaints to MSDN Support, feel free to contact [e-mail].

Answer 3

Thank you Jack, I just get an answer from Microsoft support.

Starting from VS2017, Microsoft wants to reduce the registry impact (as described here) and each instance (Professional, Community, etc...) installed on the same machine for the same user has its own settings.

In short:

• If you need to register a single component, you can continue to add the ToolboxControlsInstaller subkey in the registry
• If you need to register a lot of components, the suggested approach is to use VSIX and PKGDEF for leaving the registry cleaned.

BTW both in registry and %VSAppDataVisualStudio% folder, the new subkeys/subfolders are created for each Visual Studio instance.