Toolbox Control Installer (TCI) in Visual Studio 2017

Question

In Visual Studio 2015 and earlier there was an easy way to add a custom control to the Toolbox by adding a registry key in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\WOW6432Node\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\XX.0\\ToolboxControlsInstaller

It seems not working anymore in Visual Studio 2017, someone know how to achieve the same goal?

Answer 1

Starting from VS2017, Microsoft wants to reduce the registry impact (as described here ) and each instance (Professional, Community, etc...) installed on the same machine for the same user has its own settings.

In short:

• If you need to register a single component, you can continue to add the ToolboxControlsInstaller subkey in the registry
• If you need to register a lot of components, the suggested approach is to use VSIX and PKGDEF for leaving the registry cleaned.

BTW both in registry and %VSAppDataVisualStudio% folder, the new subkeys/subfolders are created for each Visual Studio instance.