The ORM Foundation

Hello,

I've been using NORMA with VS 2008 during some time and it has been working quite fine. But suddenly the toolbox items in the ORM Designer tab disappeared and only the Entity Type item is still there. I can't figure out what could caused this because I didn't use this tool for several weeks and it is very possible that I have changed some settings to the IDE in the meantime.

Could anyone help me to get back the rest of the items?

Many thanks,

Jose Carlos

Hi Jose,

Visual Studio manages the toolbox, and you wouldn't be the first to have the toolbox data corrupted.

Generally, you can fix this by right-clicking in the toolbox and choosing the 'Reset Toolbox' command.

Try that--and possibly a Visual Studio restart--before we get into more involved steps.

-Matt

Hi Matt,

I've already tried both suggestions but the problem remains. Is it possible to add the items again by right clicking the tab and selecting Choose Items...?

 José Carlos

Hi José,

Two more things to try:

1. With VS shut down, use the registery editor to delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ORM Solutions\Natural ORM Architect\ToolboxRevisions key and restart VS. This tells NORMA the version of all NORMA extensions that provide toolbox items (note that all models in NORMA are treated as an extension--the core ORM and shape models are just extensions you can't unload). If you delete it, the toolbox should reset when the package reloads.
2. If that doesn't do it, try rerunning the full package installation process. This is the final step of the normal setup process. Open a 'Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt', run 'devenv /setup', and wait until it is done. 'devenv' will relaunch Visual Studio.

If that doesn't cut it, then I'll have to track down the location of the toolbox item cache file that VS maintains for you. A 'devenv /resetsettings' may also do the trick, but I'm not sure this affects toolbox items.

-Matt

Hi Matt,

Ok, I tried both things including the command devenv /resetsettings but the toolbox couln't be fixed. Because I'm in a hurry I decided to reinstall NORMA with the latest version available and now the toolbox is working fine.

In case it helps to identify what went wrong, this is the error message I got after executing the first step and trying to launch VS:

Package Load Failure
'Package ORMSolutions.ORMArchitect.Core.Shell.ORMDesignerPackage,
Package ORMSolutions.ORMArchitect.Core.VS2008, Version=1.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=...' has failed to load properly (GUID = {}). Please
contact package vendor for assistance. Application restart is recommended, due to
possible environment corruption. Would you like to disable loading this package in the
future? You may use 'devenv /resetskippkgs' to re-enable package loading.

Thanks,

José Carlos