Where is the Visual Studio 2017 Winforms Designer cache?

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.