Solving Junk Output During Project Build in Visual Studio 2013

Symptoms

I had this weird situation a while ago. A developer can build a project successfully and show the normal details (couple of lines) in output window. However, when I access the same machine, the same Visual Studio instance, and builds the same project then the project builds okay, but output window will display a lot of weird &  junk details, contains inconsistencies with .NET assemblies. This behavior will occur for all projects, even for empty projects coming from VS templates before any custom code added..

I tried the following actions but did not fix it:

• Clean the build &rebuild
• Close project & re-open
• Restarting Visual Studio
• log-out from machine then log back in

Cause

It appeared that something went wrong with my profile cache within Visual Studio.

Solution

The solution I found is to delete the Visual Studio cache. Not a perfect solution but it works!

Important: Please understand that deleting the cache will make you lose all of your personal settings in VS. You can export the settings first so you can have a backup before you proceed.

Steps

1. Delete the contents from the following folders:

• C:\Users\<<Your Alias>>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\5.0\Cache
• C:\Users\<<Your Alias>>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio \12.0\ComponentModelCache
• C:\Users\<<Your Alias>>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon

2. From command prompt run the "devenv /resetuserdata" command:

• For 64 bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE
• For 32 bit: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE