These days I have been playing a lot with resource images in managed satellite dlls and one thing that I was noticing sporadically was that the Add Resource New Image menu on the toolbar of the document window of a resource.resx file was empty, while it should have the typical “Bmp image”, “Png image”, etc. menu entries. Since I was playing with 32-bit bitmaps images with transparency in the alpha channel that cannot be created with Visual Studio, most of the time I was using a 3rd party bitmap editor and using the Add Resource Add Existing File… menu. But nonetheless, I was intrigued by the missing submenus in the New Image menu. Today that I finished my investigation of the managed satellite dlls, I decided to investigate the issue.

The first thing that I noticed was that the issue was not reported on the web, or maybe only mentioned once without a solution, which was strange because I could reproduce the problem on two computers on mine. I was clueless when I discovered by chance that the problem happened only when I had my MZ-Tools add-in loaded in Visual Studio on startup. After a few minutes of debugging I isolated the problem: it happened when the toolbar of the add-in was created, so I was able to create a minimal add-in to reproduce the problem and report it to Microsoft:

The Add ResourceNew Image menu empty when VS add-in creates a toolbar
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=470755

The problem happens with VS 2005 and 2008, but it is fixed in VS 2010 Beta 1, likely due to its new WPF-based commandbars.