Where is the Visual Studio 2017 Winforms Designer

Question

I'm getting some annoying errors from Visual Studio Designer when trying to open one of my forms (Could not load type x from assembly y, even though assembly y clearly contains type x; the project builds and runs fine). It looks like Visual Studio Designer cache issue to me. I looked around and it seems like Visual Studio Designer uses a ShadowCache, normally found at

C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_6d397e1a\Designer\ShadowCache

However, that folder is empty. This suggests to me that there must be some other cache location, since I am using designer for some other things, there should at least be something in the designer cache location...

Answer 1

To clean windows forms designer project assemblies, you need to delete subforlders of ProjectAssemblies folder which is located in %userprofile%\appdata\local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\ under one of the folders depending to your visual studio version and edition.

For example for me:

%userprofile%\appdata\local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_a26f780e\ProjectAssemblies

If you look in the folder, you see subfolders containing assemblies of your projects.