views:

10

answers:

1

I'm using Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite and have always had the Build toolbar enabled and in constant use. Today after logging in I saw the toolbar wasn't there. It is available but even after disabling and reenabling it it still doesn't appear.

I have tried:

  • repairing my installation of Visual Studio
  • resetting my settings (and have tried both C# developer - my preference - and general developer settings, both equally without success)
  • resetting the toolbar
  • rebooting after any of the above steps

Any other toolbar I add (I have Debug and Text Editor enabled as well as Standard) does work. It isn't a case of the toolbar appearing off-screen (I have VS maximised) or not having any buttons on that toolbar (I have the default ones for the toolbar and haven't changed anything).

What else can I try?

Resolution:

It seems the Toolbar was there, just, bizarrely, undocked and floating on a separate monitor (I have two) behind other open applications. It was only when I, purely by chance, minimised all the other applications on the other monitor that I found the toolbar. Unfortunately by then I had tried uninstalling and reinstalling VS, and deleting my .suo files as recommended by Hans, so I'm now not sure how long the toolbar had been there for and which, if any, of the various steps I took fixed it.

A: 

The only other workaround is resetting the IDE state that Visual Studio maintains for a solution. That does get corrupted sometimes and can have all kinds of weirdo effects.

Delete the hidden .suo file in the solution directory.

Hans Passant
Thanks, Hans. The toolbar has reappeared (see my edit above) but I'm not sure if it was as a result of deleting the .suo files or not. I hadn't had it appear for any of my solutions earlier and even after deleting those files didn't have it appearing non-floating (and on the same monitor as VS) so it may not have been the problem. Worth remembering for next time though.
Val M