Today we ran into a nasty issue with the XAML design experience in Visual Studio and/or Blend throwing an exception:
Exceptions in the designer a quite often a result of code being run by the designer that is insufficiently protected using try-catch, or has assumptions that some app startup code has run, resulting in an exception that bubbles up and causes the designer to fail. For these exceptions, I recommend checking out the post How to Debug the XAML Designer by Travis Illig, which uses another instance of Visual Studio to debug and hopefully identify the code that isn’t playing nice.
Unfortunately in our case, this didn’t help because Visual Studio (and same in Blend) was failing to resolve an assembly reference.
One thing that Travis point out is that there is a ShadowCache folder located at C:UsersyourusernameAppDataLocalMicrosoftVisualStudio15.0_317bf9c1DesignerShadowCache (note that you’ll need to change both “yourusername” to be your username and perhaps even the 15.0…. to reflect the current version of Visual Studio. Change VisualStudio to Blend if you’re using Blend). Within the ShadowCache folder there will be folders created for each application where you use the designer, and then a series of “bin” sub folders that will contain assemblies referenced by your application.
The issue we found was that we were referencing a nuget package that includes both a UWP dll as well as a .NET Standard dll. Whilst the UWP dll was being copied into a bin folder, the .NET Standard dll was not. Our fix for getting the designer to work was to copy the .NET standard dll into the same folder as the UWP dll.
Unfortunately whilst this gets the designer to work, it is a sub-optimal experience as it appears that it needs to be done every time Visual Studio is run, or when the designer process is restarted.