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After upgrading Visual Studio to version 17.12.4, and updating Nuget packages, I was unable to view my Winforms solution forms in Design mode. When attempting to open a form in Design mode an error page would display with a message that Visual Studio "failed to launch the design tools server process.". I tried repairing VS, and this did not resolve the problem. Every form in my solution failed to display in design mode due to this error. I was able to resolve the problem by closing Visual Studio and deleting the Visual Studio cache files, then restarting Visual Studio. This is something the VS updater could have handled, but unfortunately didn't.
Steps to clear Visual Studio cache:
Clearing Component Cache:
Hope this helps!
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Hello @David Ebaugh ,
Thank you for sharing your solution of the issue(failed to launch the design tools server process) with us, really appreciate.
According to your description, the designer tool seems to be affected by the component cache after you upgraded the Visual Studio and the NuGet packages.
I will help to report your feedback about the "VS updater" and the updating process. If you get any other issues about VS, feel free to contact us. And if you have any additional suggestions or feedback about Visual Studio, you are welcome to raise a ticket on our Developer Community and directly communicate with Visual Studio product team there.
Anyway, glad to hear that this issue doesn’t block you anymore. Thanks again for sharing the solution.
Have a great day!
Tianyu
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