UWP Composition API breaks Visual Studio 2015 Designer - Cannot load a reference assembly for execution

Question

When I create custom control that uses new Composition API from Anniversary Update, then Visual Studio Designer is broken:

However the application runs just fine.

Why is that? how to avoid it?

EDIT: Please, vote on UserVoice (Fix the UWP designer errors) so Microsoft will adress this issues finally.

Visual Studio 2017 is out for a while, two VS updates has been released and nobody adressing issues with UWP designer.

Answer 1

I partially solved the problem by using animation helpers and controls like DropShadowPanel from https://github.com/Microsoft/UWPCommunityToolkit and upgrading to Visual Studio 2017 and installing all updated and installing latest windows update (creators)

UWP designer sucks anyway, but at least some views works, when I do not use composition api directly.

If you are experiencing simmilar issues, vote on UserVoice: Fix the UWP designer errors

Answer 2

I had the same issue. I was adding an instance on my view model within the XAML file itself.

I removed that and the designer was back!