Visual Studio offline installer and outdated .NET Core runtimes and SDKs left on client workstations

Question

My IT department provides a downloaded offline file share with all the files for Visual Studio 2019. I run the vs_enterprise.exe from this file share to install VS on mulitple Windows clients. Now the IT department will update the offline content based on updates published by Microsoft. I will run the Visual Studio Installer on each client and apply any updates that the IT department has download to the offline file share. The problem that I am running into is that I am trying to find a simple way to manage .NET Core packages that have gone out of date due to vulnerabilities. Scenario, I run the initial install in June and have certain runtimes and SDKs that get installed. Now in July the .NET Core packages have been updated. The old version of the installers are no longer in the offline file share but the old versions of the runtimes are still installed on my client. My IT department wants me to only keep the latest versions of the .NET core runtimes and SDKs installed. I have tried running the dotnet-core-uninstaller but that won't remove packages that were installed with the Visual Studio Installer. Right now, I have a very convoluted method to locate the installed GUID and using MSIEXEC uninstall the packages. There needs to be a better way to make sure that only the packages that are in the current offline file share are installed on the client after updating Visual Studio. So how can I easily remove .NET runtime and SDKs that have been made obsolete due to newer version and the installed packages are no longer in the offline file share?

Answer 1

Hi @SheaFrazier ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

I’m afraid, no easier way currently. Manually uninstalling them from VS Installer will be easier, but if you need to use command line to deploy for many clients, the way is to find the related component IDs(GUID) and then remove them.

Best Regards,
Tianyu

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