How to uninstall .vsix Visual Studio Extensions?

Question

I am currently trying to install the XNA Game Studio for Visual Studio Express 2013. And I accidentally ran the .vsix program BEFORE actually installing the XNA framework.

After installing it and re-running the .vsix, I get a message error saying that the extension has already been installed. Which is not false.

I have tried a lot of things to "delete" the empty extension : going in %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio and trying to find the extension, but finding myself with nothing, for example.

I would like to know how I can properly uninstall and reinstall the framework.

Answer 1

In the menu, go to:

• Visual Studio 2017: Tools > Extensions And Updates
• Visual Studio 2019: Extensions > Manage Extensions

A new window will pop up, then in the panel to the left, click the arrow besides Installed to bring it down and select the menu item All.

All you have to do now is to navigate in the middle panel to your installed exstension, select it and click Uninstall.

Answer 2

To expand on the answer from @Brukvoyed, you can use the VSIXInstaller.exe utility to uninstall a vsix, but you need the vsixid to do so. To get the vsixid of a .vsix file, make a copy of the .vsix file and rename it to .zip. You can then open it and find an extension.vsixmanifest file inside. This is an XML file, and if you open it you will see an <Identity Id="guid"... /> node. The guid is the vsixid you use in the VSIXInstaller.exe command, like this:

vsixinstaller /u:12345678-1234-5678-1234-123456780000

Answer 3

In case Visual Studio does not start or cannot display the Extensions And Updates management window you may try to uninstall the extension from the command line. Use the VSIXInstaller.exe utility from standard VIsual Studio package.

Answer 4

For VS2015, check your

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions

folder. I had to manually delete quite a few to remove the extensions that I didn't need. Inside each folder is a file named:

extension.vsixmanifest

and inside that file you can look at the DisplayName/Description to see what the extension is.

Answer 5

To look under the hood for .vsix extensions, here's one way:

1. Open Visual Studio command prompt

2. Run an invalid uninstall command

   vsixinstaller /uninstall:abc123

3. On the error dialog, click the link to the log.

4. The log contains a number of details, including all of the installed extensions and their locations.
5. In a particularly interesting extension location, list out descriptions with

    cd /d <interesting path>
    findstr /is Description extension.vsixmanifest

6. Once the desired extension is located via the description, open its extension.vsixmanifest to obtain the <Identity> GUID. Then uninstall:

   vsixinstaller /uninstall:801375CB-9A15-A641-CB2D-50D43AAD43DC

Answer 6

For Visual Studio 2019:

In the Visual Studio menu, goto: Extensions > Manage Extensions.

Then from the side panel of the pop up window, select Installed. This will show all of your installed VS extensions.

Answer 7

I had a problem with a LiveShare.UI (beta) which broke my Visual Studio UI so could not use the menus at all or do anything. I was going to use Visual Studio installer to repair Visual Studio, but that would probably remove all my extensions. So I picked the Update Visual Studio option instead, and now everything works again. Happy days.

Answer 8

I had the same problem and how I solved it was by not opening the solution. Just open visual studio, and navigate to Tools -> Extensions and Updates. The visual studio extension finally showed for now. When I opened the solution, and navigated to Tools -> Extensions and Updates it wouldn't show the visual studio extension.

Hopefully this saves someone some time...

Answer 9

I had 2 problems on VS2017:

Cannot find the extension

If you installed it through the New Project... > Online grouping/tab or downloaded and installed it directly:

1. in Tools > Extensions And Updates window click on the Online tab at the left sidemenu;
2. then click on the search bar at the top right (or press Ctrl+E);
3. type part of the name of the extension and it now should show up at the center of the window;
4. Click the Uninstall button.

The Uninstall or Disable button doesn't show up

After finding the extension, if there's a green check mark at the right top corner of the extension: it means you are still using the extension in one of your solutions.

So you need to remove the "inner" solution of your main solution that uses that extension:

1. backup any files you want to keep manually;
2. In the Solution Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+L) click on the "inner" solution/folder (normally it has the same name as the solution itself).
3. hit Del and OK;
4. perform the steps mentioned above (through the Tools > Extensions And Updates window).

Answer 10

For anyone interested, here are instructions for how to uninstall multiple extension with a DOS batch script.

• Reason for my uninstall necessity: On my VS2022 installation, I installed over 20 Extensions on a day before my computer systems files were corrupted, and I had to restore Windows 11 to a restore point. That caused a deletion of all the DLL for the extensions I installed.

To uninstall multiple extensions, I looked at the following folder:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio**[!17.0_60f34b7d!]**\Extensions

Make sure to change the above path to your user name and to the VisualStudio sub-folder.

I sorted the folders listed in that path by "Date Modified", which let me identify all the extensions installed on the specific date. I then went into each folder, and open extension.vsixmanifest. That file contains the vsixID needed for the uninstall command.

<PackageManifest Version="2.0.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vsx-schema/2011">
  <Metadata>
    <Identity Id="65dd734b-180a-4c67-b245-56de889637e1" Version="2022.2" Language="en-US" Publisher="Mike Ward - Ann Arbor" />

I copied the Identity Id from each extension.vsixmanifest file, and pasted all of them into a text file.

7671c1a9-8269-44eb-9b9a-bd8bec0af629
PREVIEW-INI.EC198F83-B43E-48F7-A346-3BA545D132DE
RenameVariableAfterType.09d7f563-5d3d-405b-8232-ee07e19139b9
b4558cd7-da41-47e7-8969-46c357a1b8b3
DocumentationAssistant.64c7f98c-bf02-4a60-9f8e-9ca5fd269fd7

Then using Notepad++ (you can also use VS), I held the ALT key and scrolled from the top to the bottom at the start of the lines. Then I just pasted "vsixinstaller /q /uninstall:".

vsixinstaller /q /uninstall:7671c1a9-8269-44eb-9b9a-bd8bec0af629
vsixinstaller /q /uninstall:PREVIEW-INI.EC198F83-B43E-48F7-A346-3BA545D132DE
vsixinstaller /q /uninstall:RenameVariableAfterType.09d7f563-5d3d-405b-8232-ee07e19139b9
vsixinstaller /q /uninstall:b4558cd7-da41-47e7-8969-46c357a1b8b3
vsixinstaller /q /uninstall:DocumentationAssistant.64c7f98c-bf02-4a60-9f8e-9ca5fd269fd7

After that I save the text file to a batch file (vsixUninstall.bat), and executed the script from the folder containing vsixinstaller.exe.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Preview\Common7\IDE>C:\Temp\vsixUninstall.bat

With my script I use the /q option to avoid getting a prompt after each uninstall. It ran all the uninstalls without any user input. But if there's an extension that is not getting uninstall, it's a good idea to remove the /q option so as to get more details on the failure.

Hope this helps.