My Toolbox is empty?

A couple of days ago when I was delivering a Report Design in Dynamics NAV 2009 training one of the students had a very strange problem. Being an experienced trainer I thought I had seen all possible bugs and ‘undocumented features’ of the Report Designer, but this one I had never seen before.

What happened?

Well, very simply, when the student opened the Layout of a report in Visual Studio Report Designer, in the toolbox, there were no Report Items…

What you see here in this screenshot, was in fact not there, it was empty:

I then tried to reset it, using the right-click menu shown here:

But, nothing changed. Then I looked into the Options and Customize menu of Visual Studio, but could not find anything different or special. After a bit of searching I decided to de-install Visual Studio and Re-install it, but with no success. The problem still did not went away…

After a bit of searching on vatious fora and blogs I found a solution. In fact there a folder that you can find here: “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\x.0” (were x represents the version: 7, 8 or 9) and in this folder there are several hidden files like these:

• toolbox.tbd
• toolbox_reset.tbd
• toolboxIndex.tbd
• toolboxIndex_reset.tbd

And it seems you have to

1. Close Visual Studio
2. Delete these files
3. Open Visual Studio again
4. Open the Toolbox
5. Select the Reset Toolbox option and, magically,

Report Items appear again 🙂 🙂 🙂