A powerful tab control supporting drag-and-drop, tab closing, and styling.

Enter — a powerful suite of UI controls designed specifically to bridge this gap. With the release of Visual Studio 2022 , developers are asking a critical question: Is DotNetBar fully compatible, and how can it transform my Windows Forms projects?

To ensure the compiler and designer can resolve the assemblies properly: In the Project Properties, navigate to the tab. Set the Platform target to Any CPU .

A logistics company migrated a 200,000-line VB.NET app from .NET Framework 4.0 to .NET 8 using Visual Studio 2022. They replaced 2,000+ standard buttons with ButtonX and added a RibbonBar . Development time saved: 3 months.

Solution : Ensure you are targeting or similar. If the designer crashes, the most reliable fix is often to manually reference the DevComponents.DotNetBar.Design.dll alongside the main library.

For teams using version control or specific builds, you may prefer a manual, copy-local method.

: Visual Studio 2022 is natively 64-bit, breaking older 32-bit design-time extensions.

While the software landscape evolves toward web technologies, the persistence of desktop enterprise software ensures that tools like DevComponents—which bridge the gap between the reliability of the .NET Framework and the aesthetic demands of the modern user—retain significant relevance.

DotNetBar by DevComponents is a long-standing UI controls suite for Windows Forms. The Visual Studio 2022 version brings support for .NET 6/8 (and later) while maintaining backward compatibility with .NET Framework 4.5.2+. It’s known for adding modern, Office‑style, and ribbon interfaces to older WinForms apps.

To integrate DotNetBar into a modern Visual Studio 2022 environment, developers often use the following workarounds: Manual Toolbox Addition: DevComponents.DotNetBar2.dll file directly from Windows Explorer into the Visual Studio Toolbox to force the controls to appear. Force Designer Refresh:

: One of the most documented issues is that component properties may not load in the property window, even if the controls appear on the form.