Fix Uninstall Issues with Visual Studio Versions

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Have you ever installed a BETA or CTP or an RC build of some Microsoft product such as Visual Studio, and then been faced with the unhappy situation that it could not find the installation sources when you attempted to uninstall the product, or it just didn’t uninstall “cleanly” – leaving traces of Registry entries that prevented you from installing a later version?

It’s certainly happened to me several times. But today I ran into a program called Perfect Uninstaller that, for $35, turned out to be one heck of a bargain. Perfect Uninstaller has three modes to completely and totally uninstall any program.

It starts out using the regular Windows Installer, but it doesn’t stop there – even if the installer says “I can’t find the MSI source for this”, it doesn't give up like the Windows MSIEXEC installer would do -- it picks up all the Registry Entries by scanning the Registry, and then it picks up all file traces by scanning the filesystem.

The result is a 100% complete and total uninstall of the most difficult programs – programs for which the sources may be long gone and extremely difficult to find. I don't usually make it a practice to "promote" some piece of software, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. This thing works, and it works well!

Today I used Perfect Uninstaller to remove at least 10 different components of a previous Visual Studio BETA build that up to now absolutely refused to go away, and it worked flawlessly on every single one.

If you like to live on the edge and install beta software on your primary development machine, or you just have errant software that you cannot seem to get rid of, then this little proggie is for you!

I’m now a happy camper! Go try Perfect Uninstaller yourself. Dr. Dotnetsky sez, “This one really works!”. You'll thank me later.

A final note: On Monday, April 12, Visual Studio 2010 RTM will be launched at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. My MVP Lead P.J. Forgione has a post describing what some MVPs are doing at the launch event and around the world. MVPs who will be speaking at the event include Billy Hollis, Brian Noyes, Brian Randell, Carl Franklin, Christian Wenz, Dan Wahlin, Hadi Hariri, Joel Semeniuk, Jon Flanders, Juval Lowy, Scott Allen, Kathleen Dollard,Mark Miller, Markus Egger, Michele Bustamante, Paul Litwin, Richard Campbell, Richard Hundhausen,
Rockford Lhotka, Shawn Wildermuth, Steven Borg, Steven Smith, Tim Huckaby, Todd Anglin and Bob Beauchemin. I don’t know how many of these folks will need this Perfect Uninstaller thing like I did, but they all deserve a round of applause, because Visual Studio 2010 really rocks!

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous4:27 AM

    A free option is the MSI Cleanup Utility, from Microsoft.

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

    ReplyDelete

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