Is it possible to disable Visual Studio 2008 toolbox and designer?

Question

Is it possible to disable the toolbox and form designer in VS2008 for web applications? I never use the thing and everytime I try to open a markup file (be it aspx, asmx, or most anything with markup content), the IDE spends upwards of a minute initializing the toolbox.

Since I never use the designer, is there any way to turn this off and save myself some time?

Answer 1

Right-click on a file and select "Open With..."

Select Editor of your choice then click "Set as Default".

This will allow you to just double click it forever with no UI Designer unless you want to.

If it's still a problem you can always reduce how much memory your toolbox/UI designer uses by removing custom control generation in your toolbox window. To do this go to:

• Tools / Options / Windows Form Designer / AutoToolboxPopulate - set to false

Now this will not populate your toolbox with custom controls anymore from your solution, which is probably the problem with your loading.

Answer 2

Right-click the file and choose Open With... and change the default to a code editor.

Answer 3

There will be an option to turn off the HTML designer in Visual Studio 2010 (see Code Optimized Web Development Profile (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) from ScottGu), but I don't think there's any way to do that in Visual Studio 2008.

There is a setting to open pages in Source View by default, instead of Design View. I'm not sure how much that helps with the time taken to initialize the toolbox, but it, at least, doesn't spend time rendering the preview. That setting is under the HTML Designer node in the Options dialog.