Sunday, February 9, 2014

Disable Visual Studio Extensions Outside of Visual Studio (Using the Registry)

I was having an issue with Visual Studio 2012 hanging on startup, but while trying to isolate the source of the problem, I could only get Visual Studio to start in safe mode (using devenv.exe /safemode).  In that mode, you can’t disable any extensions through the GUI.  In the end, I started poking around in the registry and found a key at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\ExtensionManager named “EnabledExtensions”.  Deleting all the values under that key disabled all the extensions, enabling me to enable them individually and track down the problem extension.