How can I make a WPF custom control automatically appear in the Visual studio toolbox?

If I create a WPF user control, it appears automatically in the Visual Studio toolbox.

Is there a way to make other controls appear automa开发者_开发知识库tically in the Visual Studio toolbox?

Conversely, is there a way to hide a user control from the toolbox?

You can right click on the toolbox and select Choose Items... Then from there you will get a dialog that allows you to select which controls to show or hide.

Per comment below if you are trying to figure out how to do this for a Third Party that you are providing your control to check out this MSDN article that describes packaging your control: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165358.aspx

Auto population is described here (at the end), but to summarize you can add DesignTimeVisible(false) to your UserControl to prevent it from being added to the Toolbox.

Your controls should be added just like your UserControls, assuming they meet the requirements at the end of the link above, which are:

To appear in the Auto-Population Toolbox process a type must derive from FrameworkElement and:

1. Are public and have a default public or internal constructor or are internal and have either a default public or internal constructor

2. Types deriving from Window or Page are ignored

3. FrameworkElements in other .exe projects are ignore

4. Internal classes will only be displayed when the active designer is for an item in the same project

5. Friend Assemblies are not taken into account for Toolbox Auto-Population

If you are building reusable controls (where your end-users will simply add a reference to your assembly), then you'd need to tell Visual Studio that it should load your controls into the Toolbox. There is a tutorial for WinForms controls on doing this here, but the concepts are the same. A VSIX installer tutorial can be found here.

A lot of the resources out there are for older versions of Visual Studio, but again the same concepts should apply. You simply need to update version information where appropriate.