VisualStudio and Blend SHADOWCACHE is filling up fast

Question

In VS2012 and Blend , whilst i'm building Metro style apps (C#/XAML), the ShadowCache folder for VS and Blend is filling up excessively fast... in 1 hour both totaled over 10GB ?!

This only started happening today for some reason!

C:\Users\jose\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Designer\ShadowCache

C:\Users\jose\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Blend\ShadowCache

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Make the web a beautiful place

Answer 1

I should add that my project is quite big in the first place, and it seems that every time I F5 it keeps a copy of the build result in the ShadowCache..

Is there a way to turn this off? As this is greatly impacting my development productivity ... I only have 16GB free on my build tablet and it fills up quickly thx to this bug!

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Make the web a beautiful place

Answer 2

The files in the shodowcache folder are required so that your app can be displayed on the design surface. Unfortunately there is no way to change this, as it is a consequence of the "sandbox" security model.

Answer 3

Hi Jose,

           We have made some improvements for the RTM release where we are not copying files into the shadowcache that are not required by the designer process. This should alleviate your problem quite a bit. It will be great if you can mail me at harikm at microsoft.com , if possible with the solution or else a description of the kind of file types in your project.

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Dev@Mic

Answer 4

Hi Jose,

I am having exactly the same problem with image files cached in the res subfolder.

Every time I build my Windows 8 App I get another 100Mbyte copy which is eating up my SSD!

Can I safely delete earlier builds? I need a quick fix for this without uninstalling VS.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Nick

Answer 5

Yes, you can.

However, if you are suggesting that you are consistently hitting this issue, we are interested in knowing more about your repro since we would like to fix it for good. Could you please get in touch offline at unnir at Microsoft dot com?

Thanks,

Unni

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Unni Ravindranathan, Program Manager, Microsoft Expression This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.