Completely Remove ApplicationInsights from Visual Studio 2015

Question

I've looked around, and haven't been able to find a good answer, so I'm posting this question in the hopes that it can be a sort of "go to" for others hoping to entirely remove Application Insights.

The first, and move obvious thing I tried was uninstalling the Tool from the Tools and Extensions, but unfortunately this made things worse! Now I'm not able to create MVC projects at all, due to missing DLLs.

I tried searching for templates that might include AI as well, but couldn't find any, so I'm stuck wondering where else it is buried that it can cause these sorts of issues. Has anyone out there successfully, completely removed AI?

Answer 1

The easiest way is to disable the extension from tools->extensions and updates window, and restarting VS. All of our features should disappear, since VS will no longer load our extension.

Uninstalling the extension from tools->extensions and updates should not break anything, as there are no dependencies on our extension. Internally, we do this all the time for testing ourselves.

HOWEVER, uninstalling the entire feature from Add->Remove Programs can and will break things, since that will also uninstall our interfaces assembly, which other features, like ASP.NET presume to exist.