How to remove Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators from Visual Studio 2013

Question

Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators extension is pushed by default and VS2013 keeps nagging about available updates to that extension but when I attempt to update it, I get the message stating that "This computer does not support the Windows Phone emulator, which requires the 64-bit edition of Windows 8.1..."

So, they push the extension that is not compatible with the OS Visual Studio is being installed on, do not allow us to deselect it during installation, keep nagging about it needing an update and when an update is attempted tell us the extension is not compatible with the OS.

On top of all that, this extension cannot be removed from within Visual Studio or from Control Panel, how could it possibly get more lame than that!?

Anyway, how do we remove that extension and "Microsoft Advertising SDK" and all the other junk we don't need, and we don't want, from Visual Studio 2013.

Answer 1

This is the best solution: Total-Uninstaller

It's an Open Source project focused on this:

Windows software uninstaller. Especially useful for speeding up Visual Studio by removing some of the bloats. Requires admin rights to run.

I was struggling a lot with this limitation and I found this software, if someone is having the same challenge, I highly recommend it.

Answer 2

Do one thing , WP8.1 SDK comes as a part of VS2013 Edition. Go to Control Panel ->Add/Remove Programs->Select Visual Studio -> Modify and uncheck the Windows phone SDK there

You wont have the issue then but beware that WP SDK will be uninstalled

Answer 3

I finally got a fix for this on my machine which is running Windows 7 professional SP1 and Visual Studio 2013 with update 5.

you first need to edit the

"extension.vsixmanifest"

file located in this directory(or equivalent):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\ProductUpdate\WPEmulator\8.1

on line 4 change the version to 8.1.0.0, so it should look like this:

<Identity Id="Microsoft.Windows.Phone.Emulator.8.1" Version="8.1.0.0" Language="en-us" Publisher="Microsoft"/>

Then run this from a command window/DOS prompt:

"\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" /setup