I tried both tips

Hi Biryulin

It sounds like your Visual Studio installation is not loading the WPF designerat all for whatever reason. If you hit a package load failure you may have chosen to ignore it in which case you will see the symptoms you describe.

Please try this:
1. Close all Visual Studio instances down
2. Open a Visual Studio 2008 Command prompt - you can find it under Visual Studio's section of the start menu (right click on the option and open as administrator if you are on Windows Vista or Windows 7)
3. In the command prompt, type devenv /resetskippkgs
4. Try opening a brand new WPF project - do you see the split view designer and intellisense etc? Or do you see any package load failures? If you see package load failures, which package is failing to load?

Thanks
Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Thanks for the help Mark.

Hi again Andrey

I am glad to see that you have your intellisense (and the WPF designer) working again on your PC.

Your problem with the toolbox has a couple of common causes:

1. The simplest reason is that in theoriginal release (RTM)version of the Visual Studio 2008 WPF designer, you only see the toolbox populated with controls when the Design tab of the designer has the focus (just click on the Design tab in the splitter to give it focus). If the XAML pane has the focus, the toolbox will not be populated. Thisbehavior was improved in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, so that the toolbox remains populated regardless of which pane has focus.I recommend that you install VS2008 SP1if you do not already have it as it fixes many other issues and provides a couple of useful additional features in the WPF designer too.

2. The less simple reason is that the TBD (Toolbox Database) files that store your toolbox data have become broken in some way. You can correct this issue by following these steps:
a) Close all running copies of Visual Studio
b) Navigate to your user profile directory for Visual Studio (this is found at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0)
c) Delete the TBD files found there (they are usually hidden files)
d) Re-start Visual Studio and open your WPF application - the toolbox should be automatically rebuilt (which can take awhile depending on your machine's performance). You should now be able to drag/drop controls onto the design surface as you would expect

Let me know if this fixes your issue or not.

Thanks
Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Hi,

I am having a similar problem with my VS2008 ... I upgraded it to SP1 but only my "Common" and "Controls" sections in ToolBox are enabled ... All the other sections (eg. Data) are greyed out. I followed what you described but now I only have "Common" and "Controls" sections in ToolBox and all the other sections do no more appear.

Please advise

Thanks

Hi @samerqutob

Out of the box, the only toolbox sections expected for a WPF app are Common and Controls.

If you had controls in other sections for your WPF apps it is likely they were3rd party controls.What were you expecting to see in the Data section for instance? Are you talking about WPF applications or something else (Windows Forms for instance?)

Thanks

Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Hi!
I think I have nearly the same problem:
If I create a new (Silverlight) Project the created page looks like that:
<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication5.MainPage"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">

</Grid>
</UserControl>

And there is NO Designerview, NO Intellisense and after 3 days on trying to solve that: no fun anymore.. ;-(
Please help me!

Hi @E.Folk

Sorry to hear you're having these troubles.

Can we try a few steps to diagnose your issue?:

1. Close all Visual Studio instances down
2. Open a Visual Studio 2008 Command prompt - you can find it under Visual Studio's section of the start menu (right click on the option and open as administrator if you are on Windows Vista or Windows 7)
3. In the command prompt, type devenv /resetskippkgs
4. Try opening a brand new WPF project (not Silverlight) - do you see the split view designer and intellisense etc? Or do you see any package load failures? If you see package load failures, which package is failing to load?
5. Now try opening a brand new Silverlight project - do you see intellisense working in the XAML of your SL pages? If you see package load failures, which package is failing to load?


Note also that if you're working in the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008, there is no longer aRead only Visual Preview pane as there was in the Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008, so that part is "By Design". You should see XAML intellisense working though.

Let me know how you get on.

Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

I have similar problem, get package loading failure:

guid = {e58c2a8b-bcc4-4559-ad59-d62eb6d58a22}

Must I unistall and re-install WinFX?

I have similar problem, get package loading failure:

guid = {e58c2a8b-bcc4-4559-ad59-d62eb6d58a22}

Must I unistall and re-install WinFX?

I solved this problem by following the instructions in this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joy/archive/2009/06/23/visual-studio-2008-package-load-failure.aspx

Thanks @KingRising - so you re-installed Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 as suggested on Joy's blog? Is that correct?

That would certainly help if the package in question had become corrupt (this can happen for 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Xaml' package under certain circumstances, especially if you have had a Visual Studio 2008Express edition loadedon a machine and upgraded it to Service Pack 1 prior to installing RTM Visual Studio 2008 Pro. The Pro SKU will show package load failures in this case until you run the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installeragain, which fixes up the problems in the Pro SKU.

Thanks
Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Thanks @KingRising - so you re-installed Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 as suggested on Joy's blog? Is that correct?

That would certainly help if the package in question had become corrupt (this can happen for 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Xaml' package under certain circumstances, especially if you have had a Visual Studio 2008Express edition loadedon a machine and upgraded it to Service Pack 1 prior to installing RTM Visual Studio 2008 Pro. The Pro SKU will show package load failures in this case until you run the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installer again, which fixes up the problems in the Pro SKU.

Thanks
Mark

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Mark Wilson-Thomas - Program Team - WPF & SL Designer for Visual Studio - posts are provided 'as-is'

Yes, I had several VS Express 2008 editions installed before installing VS2008 Pro and I still do, hope they won't cause more trouble.
I was not aware of this issue.

Thanks