Jelle Druyts

There's a pretty inconvenient bug in the Windows Forms designer in Visual Studio 2005, which apparently is a known issue but not scheduled to be fixed anytime soon. Here's the scoop and a (slightly sucky) workaround...

If you have a User Control in your project, it will automatically get added to the Toolbox window so you can drag it onto your designer surface. However, it doesn't show up in the Toolbox if the project is inside a Solution Folder (which is a virtual folder in your solution). It would be really nice if it were also possible to drag the user control from the Solution Explorer onto the designer surface, but unfortunately that's not supported.

So a possible workaround is to take the simplest type of control available (I tend to go for a plain old Panel) and add that to the form in stead of the user control you really want to add. Then switch to the designer-generated code (e.g. MyForm.Designer.cs) and change both the declaration of the panel (e.g. "private System.Windows.Forms.Panel panel1;") and the instantiation (e.g. "this.panel1 = new System.Windows.Forms.Panel();" inside the "Windows Form Designer generated code" region) to your user control type (e.g. MyNamespace.MyUserControl).

It sucks, but it works.