The ActiveX components Visual Studio gives easy access to contain a wealth of time saving reusable components. Unfortunately for some users, the adoption of Windows Vista brought to light a bug in the way Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008) interact with UAC. In some configurations the COM Components tab, which lets you add these controls to your toolbox, will have either very few entries or non at all. This can lead to a great deal of frustration and wasted time. There is, however a relatively easy way to fix your missing COM Components.

As irritating as it may be, the answer is to turn UAC back on and, in some cases, not run Visual Studio as an administrator (Not running as administrator applies only to Visual Studio 2005. VS2008 ). This is directly opposite Microsoft's instructions but appears to be the only solution until (if?) a patch is released. Service pack 1 for VS 2005 doesn't address this issue, nor does the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista. For those who can't stomach the intrusive User Account Control for day to day use, a suggested work-around is having a separate account to run VS under and make user of the fast user switching. As an added bonus, this is a quick way to test your code with UAC both enabled and disabled.

This issue has been reported with the following versions of visual Studio:

• Visual Studio 2005
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions
• Visual Studio Team System
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
• Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions