Background: Last Friday my development machine's hard drive decided to completely fail and as a result I ended up loading my OS from scratch onto a new drive. I had previously been using WinXP and since I was loading it fresh anyway, I installed Win7 Ultimate x64 instead of XP.

Since then, one of the programs I maintain that uses FlowchartX 3.2.1 (I know, old!) has had a very odd issue. I can build the project with no errors, the program runs perfectly fine, etc. The issue is that the control is not visible at all, but all of the code steps through just fine adding the boxes and arrows and such.

I think the issue is that the control is sized at 0x0 for some reason. You can see in this image that when I select the flowchart object from the document outline view that the resize handles become visible but are mashed together (the 4 boxes right in the center of the image):



It does this regardless of whether I use VS2005, VS2008 or VS2010. I also cannot go into the control's property pages and manually change the size, it immediately reverts back to 0,0. I've tried adding and readding the references to no avail as well.

Does anyone have ideas on what in the world is going on?

Stoyo wrote on Sep 18^th, 2010 at 5:33am:


If I create a new project and try to add a FlowchartX object, it does the same thing...the FlowChartX object shows up with size 0,0 at the top left corner of the form.

Stoyo wrote on Sep 18^th, 2010 at 5:33am:


Not sure what the test container tool is, but if I run the "Run Demo" program supplied with the FlowChartX install the demo flowcharts do show up and can be manipulated just fine.

Hmm, I don't see an option for ActiveX Control Test Container in any of the VS 2005, 2008 or 2010 menus or toolbars. What version of VS are you using? I'm using Professional/Professional/Premium of each version, respectively.

It's just a standard WinForms project template, nothing fancy!

I used the FlowChartX installer. I've also re-registered the DLL manually several times to see if that was the issue, but no change.

I'll see if I can add additional options to my VS installations, I'm pretty sure I had everything checked though.

What happens if you resize it at runtime, e.g. by setting fcx.Size = new Size(600, 400)?

I got the empty rectangle too with v3.2.1 under VS2008. It was ok in VS2005 I tried earlier though, which runs using the 'as admin' option as per the compatibility information displayed on first run. Anyway we cannot support a 5-year old version of the control anymore; you could either use it with VS2005, or move to a newer FlowchartX version - 4.3.1 seems to work fine.