Visual Studio does not reload source generator assemblies when they change on disk

I’m just started writing a source generator, and I’m finding that Visual Studio is caching source generators aggressively, and it’s making it very hard to do iterative development.

This is what I’m having to do to make even small changes.

• Close Visual Studio (devenv.exe) instance in which the source generator project and its consumer (i.e., the project that ProjectReference’s the source generator)
• pskill /t servicehub.roslyncodeanalysisservice
• del $env:TEMP\VS\AnalyzerAssemblyLoader -Recurse -Force <- This is where the source generator binaries seem to get cached. Both devenv and servicehub.roslyncodeanalysisservice seems to hold handles to files under this location

Am I missing something simple to get the development process working more seamlessly ?

I’m on 5.0.100-rc.2.20473.20 + Visual Studio 2019 Enterprise 16.8.0 Preview 4.0 [30517.14.main

[AdmiralSnyder]

@palpha I completely forgot that i had already released this extension which makes writing source generators with vs and not needing to restart VS all the time a blast: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AlexanderGayko.AutoUpdateAssemblyName

[AdmiralSnyder]

well, the problem usually can be solved nicely. but writing the correct source generator in the first place is a pain. i honestly wonder how the good people at MS doing that can stand all the waiting all the time. (or you have magic instantly-loading VS versions? if so, can we please have them, too? 😃