Force uninstall of Visual Studio

Arafat picture Arafat · Jan 20, 2015 · Viewed 313.4k times · Source

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?

Answer

imarktu picture imarktu · Feb 26, 2015

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!