Visual Studio 2012 keeps crashing

Visual studio has kept crashing for 3 developers over the last few weeks.

What makes it worse is there doesn’t seem to be any consistency to the cause of the crashing, it sneaks up suddenly and POW, freezes and crashes before kindly offering to reopen for you.

What made it more confusing/annoying was no could reproduce the crashing constantly, some days you would have a few days without crashing and then one day it could crash 10 times and ruin your day.

We found a solution which seems to work

(backup first) – ALWAYS

then delete the ComponentModelCache folder, which you should find here

C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\ComponentModelCache

The solution doesn’t seem to shed much light on what was causing the crashing, particularly the fact it was happening to different developers on different computers.