[WPF] How to kill and restart XAML Designer? Solution for not updated view

Lately I have started working with WPF. I observed that Design View, which enables developer to see how aplication will present it self, often hangs or stops refreshing when we makes some changes in our project. The bigger code base then there is higher chance for Design View to stops responding.

You can use popular Windows solution for any kind of problem “turn it off and on again”, but closing and opening again Visual Studio takes very long time.

Solution: Rendering view is made by seperate process, which you can kill, and then in Visual Studio you turn it on again.

You can kill this processes by using Task Manager and find any Microsoft Visual Studio XAML UI Designer, but you can do it faster by using command line and you do not need to leave Visual Studio environment.

Go to Tools -> External Tools… -> Add

• Title: Kill WPF Designers
• Command: C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe
• Arguments: /F /IM XDesProc* /T

After launching new External tool by Tools -> Kill WPF Designers. Designer should report error.

Next thing is to click on “Click here to reload the designer” and boom, you just reloaded designer without closing Visual Studio.

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dead by Ugur Akdemir from the Noun Project