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Since I develop .NET applications, one of the first things I do on my computer is install Visual Studio and the rest of Microsoft development tools.

Unfortunately they handle updates horribly. When I install a new version of something it leaves the old version which after one year of usage is a real mess. So I want to know if there's a way or a tool that can clean up all of the redundant old versions of the tools, so I don't have to do a clean Windows install every major VS release.

I saw some "mass uninstalling" topics, and I'll try to explain why this isn't related to that.

First of all, this isn't bloat, it's just previous versions of regular software libraries, that is no longer used.

Second, I saw some topics with filtering which software you want to uninstall by using PowerShell. This is also not a solution, because there isn't a way to correctly filter this out. The requirement is to remove previous versions of the software, but some of them have the same name and different version and some have a different name (example: software | v1.0 and software | v1.1 or software 2015 and software 2016)

matteeyah
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    Uninstall the old software before upgrading to the new? – Moab May 17 '16 at 17:33
  • @Moab If you're implying manual uninstalling, that would be a nightmare. There's just too much of it. But yeah, that's the last resort if there isn't any smarter way. Just to put it in perspective, it's equivalent to downloading the source then compiling a program from it versus just executing the binary in terms of the scale of work needed to achieve the result. – matteeyah May 17 '16 at 17:58
  • ok, never installed that software before, tough problem, you might try the Microsoft forums. – Moab May 17 '16 at 18:37
  • Possible duplicate of [Mass Uninstalling](http://superuser.com/questions/20099/mass-uninstalling), [Uninstalling multiple programs in Windows?](http://superuser.com/questions/892967/uninstalling-multiple-programs-in-windows-7?rq=1), etc. – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 May 17 '16 at 19:22

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