117

I've been looking to find a CLEAN solution to completely and ultimately remove Visual Studio 2010 from my computer. When you install Visual Studio, it also installs a bunch of programs (about 55) in the add/remove programs panel (appwiz.cpl).

I've already tried a small utility made by Microsoft but it does almost nothing.

I'm really looking now for a better way to uninstall any version of Microsoft Visual Studio. Because I have a lot of computers, I'm often switching to a version or another or I just decide that I don't need it anymore on one computer to get back some space.

Really, what's the best solution? If there isn't one, why haven't Microsoft developed one that is actually working well?

dan
  • 3,439
  • 17
  • 54
  • 82
  • Run the uninstaller from Add/Remove Programs? – jrummell Sep 25 '12 at 14:18
  • 11
    Uninstall the "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010" actually seems to uninstall the product but the 54 other entries created in the Add/Remove Programs stay there. It is possible to uninstall each one of those 55 entries, but it's kinda long and I'm not sure it's what we can call a "clean" uninstall. – dan Sep 25 '12 at 14:25
  • 2
    maybe not an option but, installing it in a virtual environment will make it easy to uninstall (just remove the virtual). – default Sep 26 '12 at 12:59
  • 10
    Put in your CD or mount your ISO. Run the setup program from the command prompt using the flags `/uninstall /force` – kobaltz Jul 24 '13 at 23:38
  • 1
    @kobaltz I would like to see any documentation on this about what it actually really does. – dan Aug 05 '13 at 01:03
  • I don't have any, but can tell you that from my experience, it uninstalled all of the ancillary products that were installed along with VS2010 as well as VS2010. – kobaltz Aug 05 '13 at 02:53
  • When you used the VS2010_Uninstall utility did you use /full /netfx. Just curious if that includes the components you're referring to. – JDPeckham May 17 '15 at 14:15
  • Maybe someone can test this out since I didn't and this question is 3 years old, I'm not using VS2010 anymore at all. – dan May 19 '15 at 12:27

10 Answers10

98

Update April 2016 - for VS2013+

Microsoft started to address the issue in late 2015 by releasing VisualStudioUninstaller.

They abandoned the solution for a while; however work has begun again again as of April 2016.

There has finally been an official release for this uninstaller in April 2016 which is described as being "designed to cleanup/scorch all Preview/RC/RTM releases of Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio vNext".

Original Answer - for VS2010, VS2012

Note that the following two solutions still leave traces (such as registry files) and can't really be considered a 'clean' uninstall (see the final section of the answer for a completely clean solution).

Solution 1 - for: VS 2010

There's an uninstaller provided by Microsoft called the Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility. It comes with three options:

  1. Default (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe)
  2. Full (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe /full)
  3. Complete (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe /full /netfx)

The above link explains the uninstaller in greater detail - I recommend reading the comments on the article before using it as some have noted problems (and workarounds) when service packs are installed. Afterwards, use something like CCleaner to remove the leftover registry files.

Here is the link to the download page of the VS2010 UU.

Solution 2 - for: VS 2010, VS 2012

Microsoft provide an uninstall /force feature that removes most remnants of either VS2010 or VS2012 from your computer.

MSDN: How to uninstall Visual Studio 2010/2012. From the link:

Warning: Running this command may remove some packages even if they are still in use like those listed in Optional shared packages.

  1. Download the setup application you used to originally install Visual Studio 2012. If you installed from media, please insert that media.
  2. Open a command prompt. Click Run on the Start menu (Start + R). Type cmd and press OK (Enter).
  3. Type in the full path to the setup application and pass the following command line switches: /uninstall /force Example: D:\vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force
  4. Click the Uninstall button and follow the prompts.

Afterwards, use something like CCleaner to remove the leftover registry files.

A completely clean uninstall?

Sadly, the only (current) way to achieve this is to follow dnLL's advice in their answer and perform a complete operating system reinstall. Then, in future, you could use Visual Studio inside a Virtual Machine instead and not have to worry about these issues again.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
dsgriffin
  • 66,495
  • 17
  • 137
  • 137
  • Which means I have to uninstall the 55 entries (Visual Studio, SQL Server and 53 other random components) one by one? Not sure it's really clean to run 55 different uninstallers, is it? – dan Sep 25 '12 at 14:26
  • Well, have you tried http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2010uninstall already too? – dsgriffin Sep 25 '12 at 14:29
  • this is the utility I was talking about in my OP, doesn't do much actually (and as we can see, if you scroll down that page, I'm not the only one with THE problem). – dan Sep 25 '12 at 14:31
  • 4
    Clean != quick. From Windows' point of view, those are all separate applications, and need to be uninstalled separately. Any utility that magically uninstalls them without actually running the corresponding uninstallers would definitely not be a clean solution; the best you could hope for is a utility that runs the uninstallers for you, one by one, in the right order; but all that's going to do is save you time, and really, how often do you need to uninstall Visual Studio? – Harry Johnston Sep 26 '12 at 01:53
  • 12
    By experience, uninstalling a single Microsoft entry from add/remove programs will leave a lot of garbage in both the registry and my hard drive. I still have done it (55 entries one by one) and I still see "Visual Studio" everywhere when doing some CTRL+F in either the registry or the hard drive. I've not been trying for all the other components but I guess there is still a lot of work to do there too. Well, final answer is no, there is no way to completely uninstall in any clean way Visual Studio. There still might be one: as far as it goes, formatting does a pretty good job. – dan Sep 26 '12 at 12:54
  • The article you reference is for vs2005 and 2008 only. – JDPeckham May 17 '15 at 14:01
  • @JDPeckham Unfortunately there is still no way to uninstall the latest visual studio. Microsoft doesn't want us to uninstall. – ABCD Aug 28 '15 at 12:00
  • I've tried the Visual Studio uninstaller you reference (https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller), but it doesn't seem to actually do anything yet. Or perhaps it does work, but since there's no documentation about how to use it, it might as well not. At any rate, I couldn't figure out how to get it to do anything. – Ken Smith Nov 24 '15 at 01:32
  • @KenSmith I would open an issue on the Github repo if I were you - I agree the lack of documentation is a little strange esp. as it's an 'official' tool. I've also just noticed they've moved the UserVoice status back from 'completed' to 'under review' – dsgriffin Nov 24 '15 at 01:39
  • @daniel - Agreed, it's a little odd. There's already an open issue to that effect, 30 days old, with no comments beyond mine. https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller/issues/6. – Ken Smith Nov 24 '15 at 01:42
  • FYI - it didn't work for me on VS2013 Ult #4 - as per [issue 19](https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller/issues/19) – CAD bloke Feb 24 '16 at 11:58
35

This is the simplest way to remove all the packages. From an admin prompt:
wmic product where "name like 'microsoft visual%'" call uninstall /nointeractive

Repeat for SQL etc by replacing visual% in above command with sql.

skjoshi
  • 2,493
  • 2
  • 27
  • 38
user3658994
  • 359
  • 3
  • 2
  • 2
    can u elaborate more ? can u add an example? – iosMentalist Feb 27 '15 at 07:30
  • 3
    thanks! you can also do `"name like 'microsoft visual%' OR name like 'microsoft sql%'"` to get it all in one – agradl Mar 29 '15 at 00:47
  • @user3658994 This worked fine for most of the components. Although i get ReturnValue = 1603 for "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - ENU", Version="10.0.40219" and "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - ENU",Version="10.0.40219". Any ideas on how to get rid of those two ? – thanos.a Jan 15 '17 at 00:02
23

Put in your CD or mount your ISO. Run the setup program from the command prompt using the flags /uninstall /force

I actually had ran into this issue the other day and it worked wonders. =)

kobaltz
  • 6,980
  • 1
  • 35
  • 52
  • 4
    Run it 3+ times to get rid of more stuff. Still does not remove everything cleanly... – Etan Nov 14 '13 at 11:53
  • 2
    the link in @dsg's answer showing the reply from the Visual Studio team already suggests this solution, however it doesn't work fully hence the petition for a removal software :( – user2381114 Oct 18 '14 at 19:43
  • 2
    This doesn't work for VS2010 pro. when i run setup /force /uninstall it just gives me the install splash screen. – JDPeckham May 17 '15 at 14:02
  • Tried that a couple different times. Even that fails for me, i.e., it actually crashes part-way through. – Ken Smith Nov 24 '15 at 01:30
21

The only real clean way to uninstall VS (Visual Studio, whatever version it is) is to completely reinstall the whole OS. If you don't, more compatibility problems might surface.

Permanent solution

Starting from scratch (clean install, VS never installed on the OS), the best way to avoid all those problems is to install and run VS from a VM (virtual machine) as stated by Default in the comments above. This way, and as long as Microsoft doesn't do anything to improve its whole platform to be more user-friendly, switching from a version to another will be quick and easy and the main partition of the HDD (or SSD in my case) won't be filed with all the garbage that VS leaves behind.

Of course, the disadvantage is speed. The program will be slower in pretty much every way. But honestly, who uses VS for its speed? Even on the latest enthusiast-platforms, it takes ages to install. Even if VS might start up faster on a high-end SSD, it's just slow.

dan
  • 3,439
  • 17
  • 54
  • 82
  • 5
    To be quite frank, this answer (formatting & reinstalling the OS fresh) is the only correct answer. I have been in this same situation. Microsoft products (especially VS) tend to spread out and infest every nook and cranny of your OS. Furthermore the uninstallers inexorably fail to completely remove all components and you will be left with hundreds of files, entries, and other junk still floating around. You can't simply delete the junk either because if you try, you'll most likely end up with a non-functional .NET framework or worse. – Lakey Jan 14 '13 at 05:49
  • Few months later, I tried VMware, Virtual PC and VirtualBox and I suggest using this last one as it's completely free and performances are on par with VMware (while Virtual PC is way behind). VS2010 works quite great in this environment and I'm using this VM for a lot of development softwares that I'm using once in a while. – dan Apr 26 '13 at 17:40
  • 2
    @dnLL: "Even on the latest enthusiast-platforms, it takes ages to install" - I just installed VS 2013 on a Win 8.1 with an SSD (Intel 520 on SATA3, no RAID or anything). Installation took 6 minutes. "Even if VS might start up faster on a high-end SSD, it's just slow" - startup time is 2 seconds, on cold after a reboot. – Boris B. Jan 02 '14 at 19:49
  • 4
    @BorisB. I hope you don't call 6 minutes quick when you have a high-speed SSD. But VS2013 wasn't even released when I made this post. – dan Jan 07 '14 at 04:39
5

Struggled with the same problem: Many applications, BUT make at least this part "pleasant": The trick is called Batch-Uninstall. So use one of these three programs i can recommend:

  • Absolute Uninstaller (+ slim,removes registry and folders, - click OK 50 times)
  • IObit Uninstaller (+ also for toolbars, removes registry and folders, - ships itself with optional toolbar)
  • dUninstaller (+ silent mode/force: no clicking for 50 applications, it does it in the background - doesn't scan registry/files)

Take no.2 in imho, 1 is nice but sometimes encounters some bugs :-)

Girardi
  • 2,734
  • 3
  • 35
  • 50
Stefan
  • 87
  • 1
  • 2
  • 7
1

There is a solution here : Add

/full /netfx at the end of the path!

This should clear almost all. You should only be left with SQL Server.

drew7721
  • 1,622
  • 18
  • 20
  • I would really like to have some more feedbacks on this, has anyone tried it? This has been posted in January 2014 and it talks about 55 leftover applications in the cpanel, it's almost like the author has read my post here on SO. Are you the author of that article? It does look promising and I would like to see if someone is willing to try it in a VM with VS2008, VS2010, VS2012 and VS2013. – dan May 26 '14 at 13:06
  • kobaltz's answer looks similar with the use of `/uninstall /force` and it's been said to not be working really nicely, that's why I'm really suspicious about miraculous and easy solution like that but I guess we will have to try it. – dan May 26 '14 at 13:09
0

Download and install IOBIT uninstaller: http://www.iobit.com/advanceduninstaller.php, find the date in which you install Visual Studio and select all programas from that date r elated to VS. Then run de batch uninstaller. It is not a fully automated solution but it is a lot quicker than going one by one int he add / remove programs in Windows. It even has a power scan to clean the registry.

Ranzuko
  • 11
0

If I may give an answer to an old thread; You can use PC Decrapifier to select programs you want to uninstall. PC Decrapifier will uninstall them one by one for you so you don't have to click them all seperately.

This is very useful for removing all the 'junk' - like the SQL Database tools - Visual Studio leaves behind even when uninstalled.

Forza
  • 1,619
  • 3
  • 28
  • 49
  • Sounds like a good way to save some time if going the *long* route, but it won't clean the mess in Windows registry and all the other hanging DLLs on the HDD. – dan May 26 '14 at 13:07
-3

Best way I have used is to mount the VS 2010 Image or insert the Installation disc and run the uninstall option, really works well

dames
  • 1,421
  • 8
  • 35
  • 55
  • 4
    Does it uninstall all the 55 entries in the appwiz.cpl one by one? Last time I checked, it didn't. – dan Aug 11 '14 at 13:33
-4

the best way to uninstall VS 2010 is to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility on this link http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=vs2010uninstall&DownloadId=11182

Akshay Patel
  • 5
  • 2
  • 4
    This has already been discussed in the comments that you should have read before posting this. This utility doesn't uninstall any of the 55+ programs installed with VS2010. – dan Apr 08 '13 at 12:39