This has been happening to me since last Wednesday. Honestly, I have no idea why wasn't happening before and why it started to happen now...
I have a pretty big C# Visual Studio solution, with references to native DLLs. Part of the UI is WPF, so it involves using XAML user controls. Now, when I open one of those XAML files and the designer kicks in (you can see a new process in the task manager called XDesProc.exe), my PC almost freezes.
After checking for a while, I realized that the VStudio's designer is filling the
Shadow Cache folder like crazy (in my PC it's
C:\Users\XXX\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Designer\ShadowCache). And when I say "crazy", believe me... I mean it... It filled like 8 GB of data in a few moments...
There are many people out there with similar problems (some say to have cleaned from that folder more than 50 GB of data). You can find more examples
here,
here and
here.
If any of you have any clue about why this is happening, please let me know. By now, I managed to workaround it by completely disabling the XAML visual editor by:
1.- In Visual Studio solution explorer, right-click in a xaml file and select "Open With"...
2.- Choose XML (Text) Editor
3.- Click on "Set as default".
4.- Click Ok.
Please note: I found several websites suggesting a similar change, but saying the the Source Code (Text) Editor would work as well. It didn't work in my case. The designer didn't open, but the disk activity was surprisingly the same. The only choice that worked for me was XML (Text) Editor.
Next time you open an xaml file, the visual editor won't kick in, and you won't have the problem. However, it'd good to find the cause for this... Maybe I´ll try to re-install VStudio 2013 when I have a minute...
Hope it helps !! :)
