UWP Designer Stopped Working

Question

So I have been working on this UWP project (visual studio 2017) for months and just recently the designer stopped working (it shows Loading desinger... You can continue working while the designer is loading in the background.) I have tried getting an earlier, working version of the project, but this did nothing to resolve the issue. One thing that did help was I made a in place copy of the folder containing the solution/projects. Opening this solution (with identical code) works as intended. So is there some temp files or something that is stopping the original version from working properly? I guess a solution I could use is to just work off the new copied directory, but if another solution is available I'd rather use that since this may happen again. Not sure why it happened in the first place honestly. Any information and/or help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If your app is targeting the Fall Creators Update (16299), then Visual Studio will use the new XAML Designer, which although usually being more precise with its presentation is still more buggy and I find it more often not working than working. But it is a work in progress and I am actually extremely happy it is being improved :-) .

In any case, I think you can delete the temporary files and folders for the project like bin , obj , .suo , etc. and then Clean the solution and Rebuild all . If the copy-paste approach works, I suspect there is a stuck temporary file that causes this.