Better way to restart (XAML-)Designer in Visual Studio 2012

Question

Currently when i have a problem (like errors and warnings, that are resolved but are still present in the ErrorList or to reload assemblies used by the designer) with the XAML-Designer in Visual Studio 2012 and i need to restart it, i open ProcessExplorer and kill the child-process XDesProc.exe of the running Visual Studio 2012 instance. This results in that Visual Studio 2012 displays an Unhandled Exception Designer process terminated unexpectedly! and provides me the option to reload the designer.

Is there a better or build-in way in Visual Studio 2012 to restart the designer. Reopening XAML-Files often do not help to solve the problems.

Eliaeliades

Recompiling the application do the trick for me. But in order for that to work, the assembly must have changed (otherwise VS is clever enough to not reload anything -_- ) – Frizz

I just installed Update 2 for visual studio 2012, I'm getting this less often, but still getting it... – Skiver

Answer 1

My solution (credit to Ellistraee)

• close VS and blend
• delete the bin and obj folders in your solution
• delete any .user files
• delete any .suo files
• open vs and blend
• open the offending page which would crash the designer - you should get a "please build the project" message
• F6 to rebuild the solution

And it should work!

Copartner

Wow that sounds easy! Only six minutes to get a basic function going. Atleast it's faster than waiting until the editor itself decides to do something... – Sandpaper

It sucks, yeah. My solution stopped working though and I'm now getting RemotingExceptions with any design data binding (half the usefulness of Blend, gone). Apparently some of my XAML is dodgy... – Copartner

Yep, it worked for me. I had no .user file[s], but deleted the bin and obj folders and the suo file, restarted, and voila! Thanks a million X pi! – Vanwinkle