Force uninstall of Visual Studio

Question

While uninstalling Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview  it throws an error quoting  Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview has stopped working   Message Content Include       A problem caused the program to stop working correctly  Windows will   close the program and notify you if a solution is available    I googled and found a utility that uninstalls visual studio 2010 here but nothing exists for Visual Studio 2012  2013 and 2015  My questions are   Is there any generic utility that uninstalls Visual Studio by Version     Or Is there a way to forcefully uninstall visual studio 2012 onward without using the Program and Features menu

User · Answer

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

They abandoned the solution for a while; however work has begun 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".

User · Answer

So Soumyaansh s Revo Uninstaller Pro fix worked for me      After 2 days of troubleshooting other options  screams internally   x1F600        I did run into the an issue with his method though   Could not find a suitable SDK to target  even though I selected to install Visual Studio with custom settings and selected the SDK I wanted to install  You may need to download the Windows 10 Standalone SDK to resolved this  in order to develop UWP apps if you see this same error after reinstalling Visual Studio    To do this   Uninstall any Windows 10 SDKs that me on the system  the naming schem for them looks like Windows 10 SDK  WINDOWS VERSION NUMBER HERE  -  Windows 10 SDK  14393  etc         If there are no SDKs on your system go to step 2  All that s left is to download the SDKs you want by Checking out the SDK Archive for all available SDKs and you should be good to go in developing for the UWP

User · Answer

If you don t have media  doing a dir  s vs ultimate exe from the root prompt will find it  Mine was in C  ProgramData Package Cache   guid    Once I navigated there and ran vs ultimate exe with the  uninstall and  force flags  the uninstaller ran  I opened the program  Command Prompt  with as administrator  and search run  dir  s vs ultimate exe  in ProgramData folder and find path to vs ultimate exe file   Then I changed my working directory to that path and ran vs ultimate exe  uninstall  force    Finally its done

User · Answer

This is an odd solution  but it worked for me   I wanted to uninstall Visual Studio 2015 and do a clean install afterwards  but when I tried to remove it through the Control Panel  it was giving me a generic error   I fixed it by deleting the Visual Studio 2015 folder in Program Files  x86   After that  the Control Panel uninstall worked fine

User · Answer

Microsoft now has this   https   github com Microsoft VisualStudioUninstaller releases  I allowed a windows 10 update to go through that completely f    d VS2015 so I am trying this before having to resort to a rebuild  WT    -   https   visualstudio uservoice com forums 121579-visual-studio-ide suggestions 3487794-create-a-remove-all-remnants-of-visual-studio-fro

User · Answer

I was running in to the same issue  but have just managed a full uninstall by means of trusty old CMD   D  vs ultimate exe  uninstall  force   Where D  is the location of your installation media  mounted iso  etc    You could also pass  passive  no user input required - just progress displayed  or  quiet to the above command line   EDIT  Adding link below to MSDN article mentioning that this forcibly removes ALL installed components   http   blogs msdn com b heaths archive 2015 07 17 removing-visual-studio-components-left-behind-after-an-uninstall aspx  Also  to ensure link rot doesn t invalidate this  adding brief text below from original article   Starting with Visual Studio 2013  you can forcibly remove almost all components  A few core components     like the  NET Framework and VC runtimes     are left behind because of their ubiquity  though you can remove those separately from Programs and Features if you really want   Warning  This will remove all components regardless of whether other products require them  This may cause other products to function incorrectly or not function at all   Good luck

[visual-studio-2015] Force uninstall of Visual Studio

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