Keep your project and Toolbox in sync

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:

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.

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

Cheers,