I'd like to make some room on my drive, and to uninstall Visual Studio 2010.
I don't use it anymore because I have the 2012, and I'd obviously like to keep using 2012, that is, is it safe to completely delete an older version of VS?
Will my 2012 continue to work straight after this uninstall?
From the docs
If you uninstall a version of Visual Studio on a computer that has
more than one version installed, the file associations for Visual
Studio are removed for all versions. You can remap these file
associations by using the Restore File Associations button on the
Environment, General page of the Options dialog box
Other than this maybe nothing changes, but its for you to find out. Of all the softwares Im generally happy with the install/uninstall system of VS, because of its predictability and documentation.
Related
I am currently using Visual Studio 2015 for programming ASP.NET Core applications. I have the following questions regarding installing Visual Studio 2017:
What is considered to be best practice and/or cleanest method?
Should I install Visual Studio 2017 beside Visual Studio 2015?
Should I first uninstall Visual Studio 2015 and all .NET Core dependencies and then install Visual Studio 2017?
Are there any tools that would ensure a clean uninstall of Visual Studio 2015?
From page Visual Studio 2017 Platform Targeting and Compatibility
Compatibility with Previous Releases Installation
You can install and use Visual Studio 2017 alongside previous versions of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, and Visua Studio 2012.
So yes. you can install them without any problem.
VS 2013, VS 2015, and VS 2017 all work well side-by-side. VS 2012 can be a little dodgy on Windows 10, but should also work side-by-side. In theory VS 2010 should also work side-by-side with those, but I've run into quirks in the past with them interfering with one-another.
Projects should round-trip between 2015 and 2017 generally, although there are some one-way upgrade scenarios.
Note that if you really just need the older compiler toolset for some reason, you can also install VS 2017 and select the optional component Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.140 which installs the older v140 compiler which you can still use with the VS 2017 IDE. That said, there's not a lot of reason to do this since the VS 2015 & VS 2017 C++ standard libraries are binary compatible so you can mix them in a project.
See this blog post for information on VS 2017.
It sounds like you have done some projects in 2015 already, so you will probably want to keep it.
Once you open a project in a new version, it will try to upgrade the project and then you can't go back.
However, if you have multiple versions installed at the same time, when you try to open a project, say, from Windows Explorer, it will open it with the "Visual Studio Version Checker" and will look at the project file and determine which version to open it in.
Bottom line, if you have the hard drive space, there is no reason to not install them alongside each other.
In the past, it was recommended to install them in sequential order if you are installing multiple versions, but it doesn't sound like this is an issue for you and I don't know if that is even a problem anymore as it has been several versions since I have had to deal with that.
Good luck!
Personally, I would keep both - there have been multiple times through the years where you have compatibility issues and NEED to have the prior version(s). I've also had old project that will not upgrade and I've gone back and reinstalled old VS versions.
If you have no reason to keep VS2015 in your computer I would suggest uninstalling it.
I uninstalled VS2015 after installing VS2017 and later noticing that I was still using an old taskbar shortcut to VS2015.
So I was inadvertently still using VS2015.
Maybe some special cases require keeping older versions of VS along side the new version, but for the rest of us, I say, uninstall!
VS 2015 is the last version that is supported by Installshield LE.
If you have a need for building installers in the future, it will be useful to have VS 2015
1,2,3. Visual Studio 2017 has more features over 2015 and it contains 2015's current features so you don't need 2015 alongside 2017. Just stick with 2017. And I don't think you will have any problems while opening 2013 and 2015 projects with Visual Studio 2017.
Uninstall Tool is a good tool to use. It cleanses all the leftover files and registry entries after running the original uninstallation wizard and even tells you how many files will be cleaned after the required reboot.
For people continuing to read this, I have Visual Studio Professional 2008 (For Windows Embedded 6.5), 2010, 2015, 2017 and they all work even if open at the same time.
Edit: As stated in other answers, they need to be installed from oldest version to newest.
I have Visual Studio Community Edition 2015 installed on my drive D:.
I recently got a 1TB SSD for my C: drive and wanted to move VS to that drive. Long story shortened; it was a nightmare. Although I could uninstall VS, I could not get it to reinstall in any other location except for D:. After three days of trying, I gave up and reinstalled back to D:. I still could not get it to install correctly and some things are "damaged". Updates, etc. do not completely succeed because of the "damaged" module installation. I do not want to risk running the "Repair" option in the control panel again because that often makes it worse (damages more things); which leads to a several hour process of uninstalling & reinstalling. This question shows some of the installer/uninstaller problems: Installation errors in repair of Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition on Windows 10
I am now planning on reinstalling Windows 10 Pro in order to clean up this install.
I was planning on eventually getting Visual Studio Professional 2015.
Will I have similar problems upgrading from "Community Edition" to the "Professional" version?
I was hoping to open a dialog box, type in the license key and have the "Community Editon" become a "Professional" version. Is that possible or is a complete uninstall/reinstall how this upgrade would work?
(Disclaimer: I worked on Visual Studio 2015 including portions of the setup experience while at Microsoft)
It can, but it isn't as simple as entering an upgraded product key, you also need the media.
When you buy/license Visual Studio 2015 Professional or higher, you'll have access to the install media, usually an ISO file or vs_setup.exe web-downloader. Mount the ISO image and run Setup and you'll be prompted to upgrade (if I remember correctly). You cannot (to my knowledge) have a side-by-side install of Community and Professional Edition (unlike you can with the Express editions).
Personally I would just do a full uninstall of Community first, then a clean install of Professional - when I worked on the setup experience of VS2015 I logged a whole bunch of bugs that were experienced during in-version SKU upgrades (e.g. upgrading Community to Enterprise, then downgrading to Professional), such as project template item templates disappearing, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if these still caused issues - I don't think it's worth the risk.
Regarding Visual Studio 2017
Visual Studio 2017 now fully supports side-by-side installations of different SKUs (which is why the installation directory is %programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2017\Enterprise). So rather than doing an in-place upgrade from a lower SKU to a higher SKU, you install it as a separate install entirely. You'll need to manually move your settings and extensions over (or use the Microsoft Account-based settings synchronization feature).
I personally know that when your email address subscription has professional your VS install using that email if community will upgrade on it's own to Pro.
I installed Visual Studio 2010 Premium on my Windows 7 workstation. After loading a test C++ project, I noticed that it could not locate iostream. I took a look in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\include and noticed that only two files exist here, srv.h and wmiatlprov.h
I installed the VS2010 product on a test virtual machine, and this directory (...\VC\include) is filled with the usual collection of folders and headers (the materials you'd expect to find in the includes directory.)
I have taken the following steps to rectify the missing headers on the problem workstation:
Verified that I have no A/V software active (I am using MS Security Essentials, realtime is disabled)
Uninstalled Visual Studio 2010 Premium and all other sub-products from Programs & Features
Ran the VS2010 Uninstall Tool with the /full and /netfx parameters
Deleted the Visual Studio 10.0 directories from both Program Files and Program Files (x86)
Reinstalled Visual Studio 2010 from a freshly downloaded ISO from MSDN.
I also completed the above steps, but used a different edition for the reinstall, VS2010 Professional.
So far, nothing above has been able to produce an installed Visual Studio 2010 product with all of the C++ headers installed on my workstation.
Ideas?
The solution to this problem is as follows. It is based on the solution given in
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/774158/re-installed-visual-studio-2010-and-c-standard-headers-are-missing
Uninstall Visual Studio 2010.
Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (despite the warning it gives).
Open Registry Editor (regedit).
Search for keys named PaddedVersion
Remove any parent keys VisualStudio\10.0\VC\Libraries, or similar (note the version number 10.0, which corresponds to 2010). Delete all of these registry paths. The search for the PaddedVersion key is just to ease up this search.
Install Visual Studio 2010.
Install Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
This solution may not be minimal, but it works for me. Hopefully others can confirm. The important difference here is that it is not just the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE from which the registry path must be deleted, as indicated in the link above.
While doing some research on this topic it seems like no matter how you uninstall Visual Studio there are always pieces left behind.
Two options to consider.
Option 1
Install VS 2010 on virtual machine.
Zip needed files from your virtual machine.
Copy and unzip them over to the workstation.
Option 2
Format hard drive.
Install fresh copy of Windows 7.
Install fresh copy VS 2010.
The Visual Studio installer is a fickle beast, to put it mildly. The generic diagnostic is that your registry is dirty, having a record of a sub-component of VS installed while it is not actually present anymore. There are a lot of sub-components and an enormous number of registry entries that keep track of their install state and their config. Finding such a dirty key back is a serious needle-in-a-haystack problem.
This kind of registry damage is very common if you ever had a beta or RC edition installed. I never had a beta version that didn't give me an enormous problem getting the RTM version installed. The VS2010 beta went particularly badly for me, albeit that I shot my foot badly by updating to Windows7 without uninstalling the beta. A gigantic mess, to put it mildly. You can expect similar kind of upheaval of you ever had an un/install that didn't complete. And of course registry damage is always around to turn this into misery.
The problem is quite common, there are Visual Studio cleanup tools around that aim to purge the registry after something like this happened. For VS2010 there are actually several. Google "vs2010 uninstall utility" to find them. No idea if they are different someway, no reason I can think of to not just run them all.
Chips are seriously down when that still doesn't fix the problem. Only thing left is to dig through the dd*.txt files that are left in the TEMP directory after an install. They contain a detailed trace of the installer's decisions. Beware that you'll drown in the amount of data.
I tried several rounds of uninstalling and reinstalling. The hack that finally worked was to copy the entire contents of the VC folder from a machine with a working VS 2010 installation. You probably don't need to copy all of these , but I was missing 3000+ files in include, lib, and other folders within VC.
I ran into this problem on Windows 8.1 when the VS 2010 Web installer failed to install correctly the first time. I followed Kaba's steps above with a slight difference and it solved the problem for me (so kudos to Kaba). The difference is that I deleted all the “VisualStudio\10.0” keys and all its sub-keys, as well as the “VisualStudio\10.0_Config” and sub-keys.
The solution at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/774158/re-installed-visual-studio-2010-and-c-standard-headers-are-missing not worked for me.
After Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 and SP1, I used a registry cleaner software CCleaner and installed again. It fixed.
I have a newly built Windows 8 VM with VS 2012 Premium running on it, when I try open any sln file I get the following modal pop up error
Visual Studio 2010 Shell
Invalid license data. Reinstall is required.
I can open the sln's if I open up VS and then do project open, this is really annoying, any ideas how I fix it?
*Note I have done a VS repair and it didn't solve it...and I never had any VS RC release on the machine, all new build with s/w downloaded from the MSDN
Cheers
I encountered the same exact error when I created a solution with a full version of Visual Studio 2012 Professional on one machine and then tried to open the solution file with a copy of Visual Studio 2012 Express on a different machine. I got the error when double-clicking the solution file, but not when loading the solution into an already opened instance.
I fixed the error by opening the solution file (.sln) with notepad and changing the line that says Visual Studio 2012 to say Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop.
After that, I was able to double-click to open the solution file on the machine that has Express installed.
I'm using VS 2013. I fixed this by right clicking the .sln and setting the Open With parameter to visual studio 2013 and not VS version selector or VS 2010.
I have faced the same problem. When I set the system Date and Time to the current Date and Time, The Problem solved by itself.
It looks like the .sln extension is owned by "Visual Studio 2010 Shell" a minimal version of Visual Studio that ships with products like SQL Server and Office to provide support for add-in development without any other features. Since this is a minimal version, it's unable to load any project type that ships with Visual Studio Express, Professional or above.
The same may happen when you have Visual Studio Express installed next to a full version of Visual Studio.
This may happen when you install an older version of Office or SQL Server after having installed Visual Studio. The old installer will hijack the extension.
To repair this problem:
use the "Open With" option of Windows and select the "Visual Studio Version Selector" as your default action.
Or open the "Default Programs" option in Windows, look up the .sln extension and make sure it uses the "Visual Studio Version Selector" as default:
Or locate Visual Studio 2012 in the Programs and Features window of Windows and chose "Change", the Visual Studio installer will pop up, chose "Repair" to have it repair the file associations and any other problems that may arise by installing Visual Studio versions in reverse order (it may for example mess up the MsBuild directory as well).
Remember that when Visual Studio 2010 was released, it could not yet know what Visual Studio 2012 would change, as such, it's best to install versions of Visual Studio in the order they were released. This may sometimes prove difficult, as other products may install Visual Studio versions without you knowing.
I have around 50 projects in Visual Studio 2005 that I am building a new development machine for and I'd like to slowly move those projects to VS 2008 but also have 2010 available for select new projects.
Can this work? Are there any gotchas for this sort of setup? Any general advice for running multiple versions of Visual Studio on the same system would be greatly appreciated. Specifically related to managing a controlled migration of projects to new versions but being able to selectively keep some on old versions.
I've got 7.1, 8, and 9 installed at the same time (well, and VB part of 6 as well) and I've not really had a problem opening projects file in the wrong version. The Visual Studio Solution files is "associated" with a particular version even if they all have the same extension of .sln, as you can see from its little icon. Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector seems to handle individual project files (.vcproj) fine as well.
The only thing I've had is the individual source code files not opening up in the latest version like I want, but that's easily fixed with the click of a little button in VS Opions.
Microsoft have this to say:
Visual Studio supports the installation of Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, ... on the same computer.
In general, you should install the earliest release of Visual Studio first, and then install subsequent versions of Visual Studio in the order in which they were released.
Make sure when you open up the 2005 files you're doing it in 2005. To open them in another would require a conversion which would render them incompatible with the older compiler set-up. To aid this, structure whatever workspace you're using into 2005, 2008, and 2010 so as to minimize accidental chance of this.
Second, when you double click to open the projects, it will invariably attempt to open them with 2010. You'll have to start with VS#### instead of the solution/project unless you're in the 2010 workspace.
I have VC6, VB6, VS 2008, and VS2010 RC installed on Windows Vista. I cannot double click on the VC6 dsp files without VS2010 opening and asking to perform the conversion. The 2008 C# projects open in 2008 as long as I use the solution file. The 2008 project file opens in 2010 instead of 2008 even though the version selector is the default program. Most of the time I try to remember to open the desired version of Visual Studio and then open the project.
You can mitigate some of these issues by changing the default program associations in the control panel or the registry.
Update: This setup works on Windows 7 x64, with the addition of VS2013.
Yes it can work. I'm not sure if you have to install them in a particular order... but install them in order of the versions... 2005, 2008, 2010. Should be good to go.
I can't speak for 2010, but I have run 2005 and 2008 at the same time on my system without any fuss.
And I made the double-click mistake that wheaties warns about more than once :(
I have VS2005 & VS2008 running without any issues. I have had problems when working with betas, express editions & am assuming you don't have them.
I would say refrain from making too many changes to the setup of these editions, it should be fine.
I also had the same doubt. I work at my company which is still on VS 2008 and I want to personally use the VS 2010 and not risk the 2008. I installed the 2010 and it worked fine with the 2008. Just make sure you note the projects that are in 2005 and open them with the same accordingly.
The reason why it works is simple: if you open your solution file in Notepad, you'll see which version of VS is related to your project.