How to hard reset Visual Studio instance

When developing extensions sometimes you just mess up, others someone else does. If you start getting errors loading even the most mundane extensions, these are the instructions to hard reset your instance.

• Close Visual Studio (if you haven’t already).
• Open the registry editor (regedit.exe)
• Delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\{version}
• Delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\{version}_Config
• Delete the %USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\{version} directory.
• Enjoy your brand new Visual Studio instance.

Use {version}=10.0 for Visual Studio 2010
Use {version}=11.0 for Visual Studio 2012
Use {version}=12.0 for Visual Studio 2013

If on the other side you want to reset the experimental hive you can do the same to with the ‘{version}Exp’ ones.

Happy coding!