Updating Visual Studio 2015 extensions end up disabled

Question

I have a machine with seems to repeat the following pattern with VS2015 (including all patches).

1. Install an extension and it's fine, works perfectly.
2. The developer of the extension releases a new update.
3. Update extension, which means VS2015 needs to be restarted.
4. Restart VS2015, look in the extensions and notice that the (updated) extension is now disabled.

I've tried clearing the MEF cache, but that doesn't seem to help. The only way I've found to resolve this is to

1. Delete the extension
2. Restart VS2015
3. Notice the extension is still there as disabled
4. Delete it again
5. Restart VS2015 (it's now removed)
6. Install the extension from fresh from the Extension manager.

I have another machine which doesn't experience this, and also the activity.xml file doesn't get updated unless there is a loading issue (where you get the error pop-up).

The first time I noticed this was when I installed Mads Kristensen's Web extensions pack (which included all of his components) and caused all the pre-installed components to be disabled, so I uninstalled that and deleted all the components that were bundled under that, as it looked like it didn't detect the component were already there and created a duplicate behind the scenes, but now it seems this is happening for all 3rd party components.

Has anyone got any ideas what I can try to resolve this and possibly what could be causing this?

I'm hoping there is a file somewhere in the VS folder that is logging the issue.

Answer 1

I was having the same problem with VS2015 Community Update 3.

I found this helpful tool on GitHub via this issue listing (now closed)

I compiled and ran the little utility as instructed and it seems to have sorted the disabled extensions problem out for me.