hi all

I'm writing a C++ managed custom control as a wrapper for an unmanaged dll. It works perfectly at run time, but the VS form designer is unable to load it. I get the "Could not find type..." error when I open a form containing the control in the designer.

I *think* it's because it's failing to load the unmanaged dll. I have tried copying the unmanaged dll into the the assembly output directory and into the test application output directory but to no avail.

I have a minimal test case which demonstrates the problem, so I'm pretty sure there are no uncaught exceptions.

So my question is, how can I persuade the designer to load the dll?

On a side point, is there any way of getting more information about why VS is unable to load a custom control?

(I'm using VS 2005 SP1)

cheers!
Rob

yep, tried that too

Well that sucks. Is it perhaps dependant on another DLL you'd need to copy over as well?

no, I'm using a simple test dll with a single exported class and no dependencies.

I just tried rebuilding and copying the dll into system32, and now it works. Must have done something dumb before, like copied an out of date version.

But VS never seems to unload the dll - if I change the dll, (+ rebuild and copy into system32), voila broken again Process explorer shows it's loaded by devenv.exe, even if I close the solution. This reminds me of VB development 10 years ago. The horror!

Yeah I've noticed that before, and not just with unmanaged DLLs. Just yesterday, acually, I had to exit / reload VS every time I made a change to a property editor :/