grack.com

For those of you writing Visual Studio.NET 2003 add-ins in C# (or any other .NET-enabled language), you might have noticed that CreateToolWindow doesn’t really work with real .NET controls.  Fortunately, this piece of code fixes this problem.  It’s a bit of hack, but it works for me so far and was created by using Reflector to figure out exactly what was going on.

// Run this code before any CreateToolWindow calls
Type tp = typeof( System.Windows.Forms.Control );
tp = tp.GetNestedType( "ActiveXImpl", BindingFlags.NonPublic );
FieldInfo fi = 
    tp.GetField( "globalActiveXCount", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic );
fi.SetValue( null, Convert.ToInt32( fi.GetValue( null ) ) + 1 );

I’m not sure if Craig Skibo would approve of this work-around, but it’s way easier (and cleaner, IMHO) than using that nasty shim control. If you want to figure out how this works, read my posting to the vsnetaddins Yahoo! group.