Duplicate Menu Items in Visual Studio

Recently I had a situation with Visual Studio 2010 where menu items where duplicated like 3-4 times. Looks like some configuration file was corrupted. I have tried to restore current settings and setup new settings but none worked out.

To resolve this I ran the following from command line

devenv.exe /safemode /setup

Once this ran, I restarted Visual Studio I could able to see Visual studio with default factory settings.

PS: If you have any personal settings done before you have to redo those settings again.

How to load Visual Studio without extensions

All versions of visual studio can be started with a set of arguments.

Using devenv.exe /SafeMode allows you to run any version of visual studio (devenv.exe) in SafeMode that will disable 3rd party plugins.

Using devenv.exe /ResetSettings will restore Visual Studio default settings

Run these commands from Command prompt in admin mode. For additional options refer MSDN for help.

Useful Visual Studio Extensions

The Visual Studio Gallery is the best place to find tools, controls, extensions and templates to help make your life as a developer easier and more productive.

These extensions are almost always language/platform agnostic and just make Visual Studio better and/or easier to work in. A lot of these owned by Microsoft, Microsoft DevLabs, or Microsoft employees or individuals. These extensions generally fall into language specific or technology specific extensions. That really means they may only b useful to you at certain times.

• Add Empty File
• AutoHistory (Microsoft DevLabs)
• ClipboardHistory
• Code Metrics Viewer 2013
• jQuery Code Snippets
• Commentator
• EditorConfig
• File Nesting
• ItalicComments
• License Header Manager
• Microsoft CodeLens Code Health Indicator (Microsoft DevLabs)
• Move Type To File
• NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio 2013 (Microsoft)
• Pretty Paste
• CssCop
• Bootstrap Snippet Pack
• Productivity Power Tools 2013 (Microsoft)
• Productivity Power Tools 2015 (Microsoft)
• Visual Studio Spell Checker
• Visual Studio Tools for Git (Microsoft)
• VSCommands for Visual Studio 2013
• Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
• Application Insights for Visual Studio (Microsoft)
• NUnit Test Adapter
• Shared Project Reference Manager
• Snippetizer (Microsoft)
• Web Essentials 2013 for Update 3
• Web Essentials 2015.3
• XAML Regions
• Code Cracker for C#
• .NET Portability Analyzer (Microsoft)
• XAML Formatter
• Refactoring Essentials
• ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate (predefined template pack)
• SideWaffle Template Pack (predefined template pack)

These are only few that I found useful and helpful. But there are lot out there Visual Studio Market Place.

Visual Studio 2017 RC is now available for download

Microsoft announced the Release Candidate (RC) bits of next major version of Visual Studio named as 'Visual Studio 2017', which is already known to us as 'Visual Studio 15'.

Visual Studio 2017 RC offers productive developer tools and powerful services for individual developers and small teams. Visual Studio Community 2017 RC is a free, fully featured, and extensible IDE for individual developers, open source projects, education and academic research. You can create applications for Android, iOS, Windows and the web. Integrated Azure tools make it easy to create cloud-first applications directly out-of-the-box.

Download Visual Studio 2017 RC

Before starting the download, please note that, it is a Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2017 and is a web installer that supports the following languages: Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Taiwan, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Spanish, Russian and Turkish at this moment.

You can download any of the below editions of Visual Studio 2017 RC directly from Microsoft servers:

• Visual Studio Community 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Visual Studio Professional 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Visual Studio Test Professional 2017 RC - Web Installer
• Team Foundation Server 2017 RC - Web Installer - ISO/DVD Image

What’s new in Visual Studio 2015 Update 3?

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015 Update 3 along with .NET Core 1.0

If you want to know what has been changed, improved in the latest version of Visual Studio 2015 (i.e. in the Update 3), check out the following Microsoft pages which also includes the list of other changes like performance improvements, responsiveness, bug fixes and the known issues currently available:

• Tools for Apache Cordova
• Developer Analytics Tools
• Debugging and Diagnostics
• Visual Studio IDE
• Tools for Universal Windows apps
• Architecture Tools
• Visual C++
• Node.js Tools for Visual Studio
• Web Developer Tools
• TypeScript
• C# and Visual Basic
• Team Explorer
• Xamarin

Before installing this build of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, I would recommend to checkout the Known Issues currently available in this build. Also checkout the complete Release Notes.

Point to note that, Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 now includes Xamarin 4.1. In addition to a number of bug fixes, this release adds support for tvOS, improves the iOS Assets Catalog support, improves the XML editing experience and adds selectors for SSL/TLS and HttpClient implementations when creating iOS apps.

How to: Uninstall vs2013 or vs2015 completely

When you uninstall from control panel there will be some packages do get left behind. Some are packages that do not participate in package ref-counting – often those that we do not build. Some package may be left behind because uninstalling packages in Visual Studio. If a package fails, uninstall will move on to uninstall the next package. Some are just too essential for other products to uninstall like the .NET Framework and Visual C runtimes: of the vast number of installers that chain them, too few ref-count them to rely on that feature.

Whatever the cause, having components left behind will consume disk space and may cause troubles upgrading to Visual Studio RTM.

This is how we can completely removing Visual Studio components left behind after an uninstall.

Forcibly uninstall using original installer

You do not need to have a bundle installed to forcibly uninstall packages by default. If you have the original installer – say, a previous download – you can run it directly like so:

vs_enterprise.exe /uninstall /force