Force uninstall of Visual Studio

Question

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 1

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!