Announcing the .NET Core Uninstall Tool 1.0!

March 10th, 2020

Today we are releasing the .NET Core Uninstall Tool for Windows and Mac!

Starting in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3, Visual Studio manages the versions of the SDK and runtime it installs. In previous versions, SDKs and runtimes were left on upgrade in case those versions were targeted or pinned with global.json . We realized this was not ideal and might have left many unused .NET Core SDKs and runtimes installed on your machine.

Going forward, we’ve updated the Visual Studio behavior. The .NET Core standalone SDK installer also began removing previous patch versions (the last two digits, for example 3.1.1xx) in .NET Core 3.0. If you want a version of the SDK or runtime that was removed during an update, reinstall it from the .NET Core archive. SDKs and runtimes installed with the standalone installers (such as from the .NET archive) are not removed by Visual Studio.

We are releasing the .NET Core Uninstall Tool to help you get your machine into a more manageable state AND save you some disk space!

If you’d like to see what versions of .NET Core SDKs or runtimes are available on your machine, type dotnet --list-sdks or dotnet --list-runtimes , respectively:

$ dotnet --list-sdks 3.1.200-preview-014971 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk] $ dotnet --list-runtimes Microsoft.AspNetCore.All 2.1.15 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.AspNetCore.All] Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 2.1.15 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.AspNetCore.App] Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 3.1.1 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.AspNetCore.App] Microsoft.NETCore.App 2.1.15 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.NETCore.App] Microsoft.NETCore.App 3.1.1 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.NETCore.App] Microsoft.WindowsDesktop.App 3.1.1 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.WindowsDesktop.App]

If the list is short, you can uninstall them using Add or Remove Programs. If uninstalling via that dialog appears tedious, you can download and use the .NET Core Uninstall Tool! For specific commands and detailed instructions, see the .NET Core Uninstall Tool article.

This is a powerful tool and it’s easy to make a mistake. But don’t worry… you can always either run a repair on Visual Studio or reinstall from the .NET Core archive.

Because this tool is based on installers, it works only on Windows and Mac and not on Linux.

Hope this helps!