XAML (Windows Store apps) editing in Visual Studio broken with NVIDIA Optimus

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Sun, 04/07/2013 - 21:01

I have a fancy laptop that seems to delight in giving me headaches, and the latest is to do with Windows Store app development. The problem is simple, you edit the XAML and nothing happens! You need to trigger a full redraw of the screen to get it to render the changes, the below video may explain it better:

The issue here is that my fancy laptop has two graphics cards, a low powered Intel one (great for battery – average for performance) & a high powered NVIDIA one (bad for battery – great for performance). Add to this, that it uses a new technology from NVIDIA called Optimus which allows individual parts of the screen to be rendered by each card – the best explanation of this can be found on SuperUser.

So what is the solution to this problem? Disable one of the graphics card – yeah, that is the work around at this point. I am doing this by using device manager to disable the NVIDIA one.

image

That fixes the rendering issue and allows Visual Studio to work properly. Not great by any stretch of the imagination.