You do not need to elevate to install them, though if you pre-elevate you can install them per-machine (by default they are per-user). These are general-purpose PowerShell cmdlets I created for all sorts of development and troubleshooting operations for Windows Installer-based installs. This may cause other products to function incorrectly or not function at all. Warning: This will remove all components regardless of whether other products require them. The example below is for Visual Studio 2015, and I will list the relevant component GUIDs for other releases below that. The general solution is to find the products that also installed these shared components and remove them. Some other products that integrate with Visual Studio installed and use these same shared components, and would have to be removed too. When you have multiple editions installed, this save disk space since shared files occupy the same location on disk – not to mention results in faster install times since Windows Installer doesn’t copy the same bits again.Īnd while we do support build-to-build upgrades, those shared components are already installed so the choice to relocate components is disabled.Įven if you’ve uninstalled previous releases, you may find this option disabled.

This is because once a set of shared components is installed, we install all the other components to the same directory structure. If you’ve installed pre-release versions of Visual Studio – or even another edition of the same release – you may find you can’t change the installation target directory.

Visual studio install location