Windows Workflow 4.0 Activities not being added to the toolbox

Question

I've created a class project in VS 2010 Beta 2. I've added one Activity to it. Saved it. Created another Activity. I would expect the first Activity to appear in the toolbox so I could drag it into my workflow, but it's not. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Not really the same question but in Visual Studio 2012, on a 64 bit windows, I had a 64 bit application with CodeActivity and NativeActivity and they were not showing up in the toolbox. I changed the application to AnyCPU and built it, and the activities are now displayed... I hope it will help someone :)

Answer 2

I experienced this issue too. My workflow service project was part of a solution with other projects. I removed the workflow service project from the main solution and created a new solution only containing the workflow service project. After a build, the custom activities were generated and listed in the toolbox.

Answer 3

I don't know if this is still relevant for you but I had the same problem.

I could solve it like this:

• Right click on the Toolbox to open context menu.
• Select Choose Items...
• Select the tab System.Activities Components
• Click on browse and select the dll that contains the custom activity
• Make sure that the activity shows in the list and is checked
• Click OK

Answer 4

I had this problem with Visual Studio 2010 RTM as well. I wrote a blog post with a potential solution here.

Essentially, the toolbox doesn't load your custom activities if you have two projects in your solution that share the same folder.

Answer 5

Make sure your Custom Activity class is marked as public.

Answer 6

I resolved this by creating a Windows Workflow 4.0 Console application and then removing out the Program.cs. Very odd, but it worked.