How to restart Visual Studio manually?

Question

Is there any way to restart Visual Studio 2010 (and possibly 2008 as well but not so important) manually and keeping the current state (i.e. all open solutions/projects and files)? Basically the same operation as when you install an extension and Visual Studio asks to restart itself. Occasionally Visual Studio gets confused after things like folder renames/moves, reference changes or the GUI editor throws a wobbly so it would be nice to be able to quickly restart the solution/project rather than close Visual Studio, reopen it and load the solution/project again.

Solution 1

I don't really like answering my own question but I found the RestartStudio extension for Visual Studio 2010 that adds the restart option to the File menu and seems to work well.

Solution 2

Visual Studio Restart is another plugin that works for Visual Studio 2013.

Restart Visual Studio for 2015

VSRestart2017 for 2017

Visual Studio Restart for 2017 & 2019

Restart for Visual Studio 2022 Preview for 2022

Comments

[Lasse V. Karlsen]

Have you gone through the list of installed extensions and tried disabling them? You really shouldn't need to keep restarting Visual Studio like that.

[Piers Myers]

@Lasse - Sometimes I think it may be due to Resharper but I'm not going to remove that as it is too useful. I don't really know what causes these occasional hiccups and the restart usually resolves them.

[backslash17]

Little things make life easier!

[Sam Rueby]

Sad that it's necessary.

[ThunderWiring]

does not install for VS2010

[noonand]

Doesn't work for VS2015 - "This extension is not installable on any currently installed products."

[noonand]

Doesn't work for VS2015 - "This extension is not installable on any currently installed products."

[Piers Myers]

@noonand The question was specifically for VS2010, but if you want something for VS2015 then try: marketplace.visualstudio.com/…

[Shashank Shekhar]

@noonand thanks for pointing that out, updated my answer with the available extensions for 2015 and 2017

[Saad A]

How to do this in express version of Visual Studio, I am in a situation where I need to restart VS in order for MvcMailer to Work.

[Piers Myers]

As I remember, VS2010 Express doesn't work with extensions at all.

[carloswm85]

This should be the selected answer stackoverflow.com/a/28463497/7389293 even though it was done later in time, it is more complete.