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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T12:08:56+00:00

I’m working on a solution that has a couple DLLS meant for the GAC.

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I’m working on a solution that has a couple DLLS meant for the GAC. Since I don’t want to have to update the GAC every time I test a small change I put the following in my app.config and cleared out the GAC.

<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <runtime>
    <developmentMode developerInstallation="true"/>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

Now everything works great – most of the time. The system tries to load the files in my BIN folder instead of the GAC and all is good – almost.

There’s one critical issue – if I ever try to open a XAML file (even a new one) Visual Studio thinks “hey, this used to be in the GAC?” Visual studio then freezes. Once I forcibly close visual studio the old versions of the dll re-appear in the GAC. Any idea why this happens? Any idea how to fix it?

Right now I’m editing all my xaml files in notepad++ but i think that this is a horrible solution.

I removed all plugins before I asked this question. The CSPROJ files are set to look at projects before them in the build order, not the GAC. Everything works fine if I don’t open XAML files.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I found the issue – I believe the issue happened because I ran the program’s installer for an older version. This placed the items in the GAC. The program somehow tired to fix itself by re-inserting the dlls after I removed them. The conflicting information (installed version vs VS version) confused Visual Studio and caused the Visual Studio crash.

    Once I uninstalled the program I was working with via add/remove programs and worked exclusively with the visual studio version everything worked fine. Since the program was completely removed it didn’t try to repair itself when it saw items were missing.

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