In Visual Studio 2005 during design time my toolstrip disappears when I click any part of the form. Selecting the control in the properties window combo brings the control back onto the screen.

At run time the toolbar is no where to be seen.

Can anyone help me with this

thanks

OK I sorted this out,

It appears that some jokerchanged the visible property to false which gives rise to the strange design time behaviour.

nice

OK I sorted this out,

It appears that some jokerchanged the visible property to false which gives rise to the strange design time behaviour.

nice

This happens to us on a regular basis when the toolstrip is inside in a tab control. Depending on which which tab is visible, what the last action you did before building/running the app, the phase of the moon on so on the toolbar on the current tab page will magically have its Visible property set to false.

It is annoying to keep having to turn it back on so I ended up writing code to recurse through the form's controls andmake all of the toolstrips visibleevery time on the load event.

We still have to monkey around to select the toolstrip in order to make design time changes but at least we aren't accidentally releasing test builds with missing toolbars (at runtime) anymore.

Jeff

Jeff,

I can confirm the very similar problem. Please read my thread from here:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1545076&SiteID=1&mode=1

Marek

I've been encountering this problem also, whenever I put a toolstrip on a tabpage, it keeps disappearing. For some reason it keeps getting set to Visible = False even though I am not doing that, is there a proper fix for this yet?

I do not know of any official fix or work-around. Here is thefix that I came up with. Just call EnsureToolbarsAreVisible(this) from your form load code.

Jeff

public void EnsureToolbarsAreVisible(Form formFix)
{
if (formFix != null)
EnsureToolbarControlsAreVisible((Control.ControlCollection)formFix.Controls);
}

public void EnsureToolbarControlsAreVisible(Control.ControlCollection ctrls)
{
if (ctrls != null)
{
try
{
foreach (Control ctrl in ctrls)
{
ToolStrip ts = ctrl as ToolStrip;
TabControl tc = ctrl as TabControl;
SplitContainer sc = ctrl as SplitContainer;

if (ts != null)
ts.Visible = true;
else if (tc != null)
{
foreach (TabPage tp in tc.TabPages)
EnsureToolbarControlsAreVisible((Control.ControlCollection)tp.Controls);
}
else if (sc != null)
{
EnsureToolbarControlsAreVisible((Control.ControlCollection)sc.Panel1.Controls);
EnsureToolbarControlsAreVisible((Control.ControlCollection)sc.Panel2.Controls);
}
else if (ctrl.Controls != null)
EnsureToolbarControlsAreVisible((Control.ControlCollection)ctrl.Controls);
}
}
catch (Exception e)
{
MessageBox.Show(e.Message);
}
}
}

Ah nice, thanks

still annoying in design time when making changes, surprised that Microsoft haven't fixed this obvious bug yet, considering it's been here for so long

If you are using a ToolStripContainer you should also checkout for the TopToolStripPanelVisible property.

Visual Studio Form designer sets this to false when you click on different ToolStrips.

If you want all your TopToolStripPanes visible consider extending the code above for a fix, if not set the appropriate TopToolStripPanelVisible property in your own code, otherwise change the Designer generated code and never use the designer again (Thank god )

Visual Studio 2008 still has this problem. It's a bug in the winform designer and has been around for years. It's so irritating and ahuge issue for us as we can't release without constantly checking to see that these are still visible. We're starting to lose confidence in the designer, especially after all this time.

Hi All,

Because I had to many Toolstrips into tabs controls and it became a nightmare to find the hiden ones, I did a very small add-in to put the visible property to true again.

Here is the add-in:
http://membre.oricom.ca/frabla/controls/FrablaToolstripVisibilityFix/SetupFrablaToolstripVisibilityFix.msi

I hope that it will be usefull for anyone who have the same problem! Cheer!

Frank

Ho! I forgot to say that add-in is made for VS2005, I don't know if it works with 2008!

Yeah, this doeshave to do withthe visibility settings. I found the problem toonesimiliar issue as well that's been around for 4 years.I already posted the work around solution at the link below.

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=119591&wa=wsignin1.0