Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.VC.Interfaces

Question

I updated my community edition of visual studio 2017 to 15.3.0

and I got this new build error

Build Failure. Error: Could not load file or as

Answer 1

I had a similar experience, but with Enterprise.

The error persisted until I disabled Lightweight Solution Loading, but I'm including the other steps I took in case they were pre-requisites.

• I had installed the Azure Functions Support, which wanted me to restart Visual Studio, but I didn't do that until after I started getting the build error message.
• I re-ran Visual Studio installer and clicked "Modify", even though I didn't change any options, because it wanted to do something, saying my installation size would decrease by 15MB. (Some cleanup from the Azure Functions installation is my guess.)
• I disabled the Lightweight Solution Load, closes and re-opened the solution, and it finally tried to build. It failed and I got a lot of messages about running NuGet Restore and Build in parallel, but it ran. Once I did a manual NuGet Restore, the build worked.

I hope this helps.