How do you clear Visual Studio's object browser cache?

Question

We have a library project that we are working on, and in a different project I have the feature branch installed as a Nuget package. Changes are being made on the branch, but version number isn't being updated, so the Nuget package is getting updated, but it has the same name.

I've deleted the Nuget package from my packages folder, so I know I am downloading the latest, and if I manually browse (in the Object Browser) to the dll that I have downloaded to my packages folder, the Object Browser data looks correct.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled the Nuget package in my project, I've turned off all instances of Visual Studio 2017, but still old items are persisting in the Object Browser for my dll that I have installed through Nuget. I am expecting to have build failures because I'm referencing old items, but everything builds successfully, but then when I run the application I am getting run time errors because the old items I am referencing in code no longer exist in the dll that is currently downloaded.

It would be nice if we didn't have to bump version for every build, although we could set up TeamCity to do that automatically, but it would become difficult to maintain all of the extra Nuget packages in our feed.

So, short of just bumping version numbers on the dev Nuget packages, is there any way to clear the cache in Visual Studio 2017 so that the Object Browser updates to reflect the dll that is actually in the packages folder?

Answer 1

I found the problem. In the project where I was testing the library, I had a wpf project and a library project targeting .Net standard. Since the project I was actively working on was wpf I was zoned in on the packages folder in the solution directory, and forgot I was also referencing .Net standards in the same solution which pulls Nuget packages from C:\Users\[username]\.nuget\packages

Because of the project types, Visual Studio had two locations for Nuget packages. One at C:\Users\[username]\.nuget\packages and one at [solution dir]\packages

I updated only the solution directory packages, but apparently Visual Studio 2017 favors the use of the user directory packages, and that is where it was pulling the old API information. After deleting the package from my user directory everything is working as expected.