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I am unable to access the winforms designer in VS2022 or VS2026. The error simply says "Timed out while connecting to named pipe". The project was built in 2022 so I know it has previously worked. This error has only began to appear today.
Restarting does not work. I have both updated and reinstalled and the error still persists. Clean and rebuild and all the general channels that the AI chatbot tells me to do have not worked.
Have you tried the projects created today as well?
I am able to open forms created today but nothing legacy which is an issue as I need to access older forms for work.
for more info,
this seems to be the root cause although I'm unsure how to fix:
Unhandled exception. System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Abstractions, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=adb9793829ddae60'. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (0x80131040)
seems it was an error caused by a nuget reference gone awry. Fixed now, although the displayed error was very misleading.