How to completely uninstall Visual Studio 2010?

Question

Update April 2016 - for VS2013+

Microsoft started to address the issue in late 2015 by releasing VisualStudioUninstaller.

They abandoned the solution for a while; however work has begun again again as of April 2016.

There has finally been an official release for this uninstaller in April 2016 which is described as being "designed to cleanup/scorch all Preview/RC/RTM releases of Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio vNext".

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Original Answer - for VS2010, VS2012

Note that the following two solutions still leave traces (such as registry files) and can't really be considered a 'clean' uninstall (see the final section of the answer for a completely clean solution).

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Solution 1 - for: VS 2010

There's an uninstaller provided by Microsoft called the Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility. It comes with three options:

1. Default (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe)
2. Full (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe /full)
3. Complete (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe /full /netfx)

The above link explains the uninstaller in greater detail - I recommend reading the comments on the article before using it as some have noted problems (and workarounds) when service packs are installed. Afterwards, use something like CCleaner to remove the leftover registry files.

Here is the link to the download page of the VS2010 UU.

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Solution 2 - for: VS 2010, VS 2012

Microsoft provide an uninstall /force feature that removes most remnants of either VS2010 or VS2012 from your computer.

MSDN: How to uninstall Visual Studio 2010/2012. From the link:

Warning: Running this command may remove some packages even if they are still in use like those listed in Optional shared packages.

1. Download the setup application you used to originally install Visual Studio 2012. If you installed from media, please insert that media.
2. Open a command prompt. Click Run on the Start menu (Start + R). Type cmd and press OK (Enter).
3. Type in the full path to the setup application and pass the following command line switches: /uninstall /force Example: D:\vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force
4. Click the Uninstall button and follow the prompts.

Afterwards, use something like CCleaner to remove the leftover registry files.

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A completely clean uninstall?

Sadly, the only (current) way to achieve this is to follow dnLL's advice in their answer and perform a complete operating system reinstall. Then, in future, you could use Visual Studio inside a Virtual Machine instead and not have to worry about these issues again.

This is the simplest way to remove all the packages. From an admin prompt:
wmic product where "name like 'microsoft visual%'" call uninstall /nointeractive

Repeat for SQL etc by replacing visual% in above command with sql.

Put in your CD or mount your ISO. Run the setup program from the command prompt using the flags /uninstall /force

I actually had ran into this issue the other day and it worked wonders. =)

The only real clean way to uninstall VS (Visual Studio, whatever version it is) is to completely reinstall the whole OS. If you don't, more compatibility problems might surface.

Permanent solution

Starting from scratch (clean install, VS never installed on the OS), the best way to avoid all those problems is to install and run VS from a VM (virtual machine) as stated by Default in the comments above. This way, and as long as Microsoft doesn't do anything to improve its whole platform to be more user-friendly, switching from a version to another will be quick and easy and the main partition of the HDD (or SSD in my case) won't be filed with all the garbage that VS leaves behind.

Of course, the disadvantage is speed. The program will be slower in pretty much every way. But honestly, who uses VS for its speed? Even on the latest enthusiast-platforms, it takes ages to install. Even if VS might start up faster on a high-end SSD, it's just slow.

Struggled with the same problem: Many applications, BUT make at least this part "pleasant": The trick is called Batch-Uninstall. So use one of these three programs i can recommend:

• Absolute Uninstaller (+ slim,removes registry and folders, - click OK 50 times)
• IObit Uninstaller (+ also for toolbars, removes registry and folders, - ships itself with optional toolbar)
• dUninstaller (+ silent mode/force: no clicking for 50 applications, it does it in the background - doesn't scan registry/files)

Take no.2 in imho, 1 is nice but sometimes encounters some bugs :-)