How to uninstall a Visual Studio 2013 extension manually?

Question

I just installed an extension to my Visual Studio 2013 app. I decided I don't want that extension so I went to Tools->Extensions and Updates and scrolled down to the extension I want to install.

The problem is, the uninstall button doesn't do anything when I click it (and the Disable button is not even active).

I then tried running Visual Studio as Administrator but that didn't work either.

I searched the web for suggestions and I found one page that said to use the VSIXInstaller.exe utility found in Visual Studio's install directory. To uninstall and extension you have to run it with the following command line:

VSIXInstaller /q /a /u:{VSIXIdentifier}

My question is, how do I get the identifier? Is it the same as the extension version?

Also, let's say hypothetically that using VSIXInstaller does not work. Is there a way to manually uninstall an extension?

P.S. As I am posting this Stack Overflow is telling me there might be a duplicate question. I read the other question and it's not quite the same. The solution given on that answer is to run VS as Administrator which I have already tried.

Solution 1

My question is, how do I get the identifier? Is it the same as the extension version?

Extensions are normally packaged in a VSIX file, which are just zip archives. Inside the zip archive is a manifest file that gives the extension identifier.

Here is a view of a SQLite VSIX file, with the manifest file (extension.vsixmanifest) highlighted:

If you open the manifest file, you will see something like:

<PackageManifest Version="2.0.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vsx-schema/2011">
  <Metadata>
    <Identity Id="SQLite.WinRT" Version="3.8.5" Language="en-US" Publisher="SQLite Development Team" />
    <DisplayName>SQLite for Windows Runtime</DisplayName>
    ...

To answer your question, the identifier is the Id field in the third line above. In this case SQLite.WinRT.

On my machine, I ran the following and was able to uninstall the SQLite extension:

vsixinstaller /q /a /u:SQLite.WinRT

Also, let's say hypothetically that using VSIXInstaller does not work. Is there a way to manually uninstall an extension?

I think this is a rather broad question. I am no expert on VSIX extensions, but it seems each one can have it's own quirks. Simply deleting a directory, as suggested in this answer, may work 90% of the time; however, there may be extensions that cannot be uninstalled this way. The PHP extension falls into the latter case.

I think the question you are trying to ask is this one:

How do I uninstall the PHP Tools for Visual Studio 2013 extension?

The answer appears to be in your screen shot. If you look in the lower right corner of your screen shot, you will see this text:

You need to use the Programs and Features pane in the Windows Control Panel to remove this extension.

Sure enough if I take a look at the Programs and Features, I see this:

Solution 2

Well the above answers didn't work for me, when trying to uninstall the Advertising SDK, F# and Windows Phone crap that somehow got installed into my VS. I couldn't use the Uninstall button on the Extensions dialog, and they were missing from Programs And Features.

I managed to get rid of them all using the tool from https://totaluninstaller.codeplex.com - it seems some guy got fed up with VS too and coded up something to remove these extensions. It works by listing out all extensions you have registered, you can filter that list via config, then when you're happy you can go ahead and uninstall that filtered list. Worked nicely for me!

Solution 3

Total-Uninstaller (https://github.com/tsasioglu/Total-Uninstaller) will easily remove all that clutter. Just download, execute as administrator and select every thing that has to go.

Solution 4

The solution is pretty simple, you need to uninstall it directly from the "Programs and Features", because it is develop by another company. I hope it still helps.

View more solutions

Comments

[Jatin]

Try this: blog.spinthemoose.com/2013/01/02/… or this: stackoverflow.com/questions/21903663/…

[ouah]

Ran into the same issues a while back and wrote up a blog post: Registering and unregistering weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2016/Mar/01/…

[demoncodemonkey]

Looks like the VS2013 Update 4 caused all that crap to return, so I needed to run it again today. Bleh, MS, bleh.

[Pflugs]

One quick note for future readers... be sure to run your command prompt using Run as Administrator or it will not work correctly. You'll see this warning in other places as well, but I wanted to make sure it was here, too.

[Pflugs]

One more follow up comment from someone who just used this tool to remove dozens of extensions... Even after TotalUninstaller said it uninstalled the extensions, I still saw some of them in VS. To fully remove them from the Extensions list, I used CCleaner to clean the registry (select all options and remove all issues). I also ran the cleaner utility. Once this action was taken, I re-launched VS, and the offending Extensions were gone for good!

[Joe Gayetty]

"The answer appears to be in your screen shot." Ha ha, that's funny! I came here looking for the same answer as the OP, and lo and behold, the answer was right there staring me in the face! Using "Programs and Features" did the trick. Thanks.