I have been working with an extension from a software company that I could not uninstall by going through the usual Visual Studio Extensions ->Manage Extensions -> Installed screen. Ultimately I determined that the extension had a bug in the uninstaller. Face it – how much does an uninstaller get tested anyway?
I followed the instructions in many seemingly good web posts and was not successful. I finally had to manually delete the extension. This turned out surprisingly easy, but by not using the actually uninstall process, the package could very well leave pieces laying around. We’ll see.
Remove Extension Forcibly
I have VS2019 and VS2022 so the collective wisdom of the web said they are usually installed in either:
%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<Visual Studio version>\Extensions\
or here for administrative extensions:
<Visual Studio installation folder>\Common7\IDE\Extensions\
In my case, the extension was installed for all users and was in both VS2019 and VS2022 as the following folder. I was lucky in that the extension name was obvious. This is not always the case.
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\Common7\IDE\Extensions\abcDevTools\ C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\Common7\IDE\Extensions\abcDevTools\
I dragged the folders out of Extensions and the product was “uninstalled”. Fortunately, there were no side effects to either Visual Studio. I realize I am a little lucky here.