Hi
I have various controls from 3rd parties on my toolbox as well as my own custom user controls from my own libraries. A lot of these controls are not loaded in the GAC and are referenced directly from either the a RAM-drive (B:\Components for non-GAC assemblies) or from the project output folders (in the case of my own libraries). Over time however, especially after updating 3rd party controls, controls in the toolbox gets lost and I basically have to rebuild and organize the toolbox from scratch which wastes quite a bit of time.
Now I didn't use to have this issue in Visual Studio 2010. Well, controls still got lost, but I used to export the settings once the toolbox was properly configured and simply import it once controls get lost. In VS2012 however, this doesn't work anymore since it seems that the control version gets stored somewhere and isn't loaded dynamically anymore. Whenever I try to add a control to a form after doing such and import, I get the error: Failed to create component 'control_name'. The error message follows: 'System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8004D745): A reference to the component 'library_name' already exists in the project.
When I move the cursor over the controls in the toolbox, I can see that the control version refers to the previous version number even though the file it is pointing to, is the latest version. I also tried modifying the exported settings in Notepad by replacing the version numbers with the latest version numbers and importing that, but it still refers to the old version numbers.
How can I get this to work again?