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When doing Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform apps development with Visual Studio 2017, the Windows Start Menu becomes cluttered with the names of various Windows apps that are built by Visual Studio and installed. In the image below a couple of examples of these Visual Studio built apps in the Start Menu are indicated with red arrows

I have a second laptop that has Visual Studio 2015 installed as well as Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition and that laptop has UWP apps created during testing with Visual Studio 2015 which are also cluttering up the Start Menu.

Similar clutter is also evident in the Apps & Features area of the Control Panel from which apps are uninstalled.

However there are entries in the Start Menu which do not have a corresponding entry in the Apps & Features list.

screen shot of Windows Start Menu showing Visual Studio created UWP apps that are temporary and need to be removed

Question

I have seen a Powershell script that when run will remove these unneeded and temporary Windows apps created during development with Visual Studio from the Start Menu. What the script did was to generate a list of the Visual Studio generated Start Menu entries and then removed them.

The script knew the difference between a regular installed app and one created by Visual Studio 2017 when doing and testing UWP apps in the IDE debugger.

However I am unable to locate the script which is a couple lines of PowerShell script and which worked great at eliminating the clutter of UWP apps built by Visual Studio 2017 from the Windows Start Menu.

If it makes a difference to the script, I am using Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition C++ with the UWP templates. I would hope that the same script would also eliminate the clutter generated by Visual Studio 2015 when doing UWP app development.

This is not the same question as:

The following Superuser postings have some information about using PowerShell to find and remove apps however again these are not explicitly addressing this question of temporary apps created by Visual Studio during development and testing of UWP apps.

The Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition when running a UWP app in the Debugger will also automatically install the app. From what I remember the PowerShell script I am looking for would remove those installs as well.

screen shot of Installed Apps showing Visual Studio IDE installed debug version of UWP app

Addendum: testing some proposed solutions

I have found a couple of stackoverflow postings that provide a PowerShell script for eliminating these Visual Studio installed debug UWP apps.

Both use similar PowerShell commands.

  • Get-AppxPackage -Publisher "CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US" | ? {$_.IsDevelopmentMode -eq "True"} | Remove-AppxPackage

  • Get-AppxPackage | ? {$_.IsDevelopmentMode -eq $True} | Remove-AppxPackage

However when I tested the first of these with my Windows 10 Enterprise laptop running PowerShell as an Administrator it did not seem to clean up the Start Menu nor did it remove the development app from the Apps & features dialog.

However it did remove those apps that were listed when I ran the Get-AppxPackage command without the Remove-AppxPackage in order to see a list of what was found before doing a delete.

Get-AppxPackage -Publisher "CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US" | ? {$_.IsDevelopmentMode -eq "True"}

I then modified the PowerShell command by removing the -Publisher option to filter by $_.IsDevelopmentMode only and I get a listing of the two UWP apps installed by Visual Studio that I was working with.

screen shot of PowerShell window showing Get-AppxPackage | ? {$_.IsDevelopmentMode -eq "True"}

However I have more clutter than this in my Start menu.

screen shot Start menu with Visual Studio created apps clutter

Richard Chambers
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    Use the `Pin-App` function in [this SU Qestion](https://superuser.com/questions/1191143/how-to-unpin-windows-10-start-menu-ads-with-powershell) with the `-UnPin` switch. This is also the `verb` to use when googling. –  May 27 '18 at 07:11
  • @LotPings from what I remember the PowerShell script used the `Get-appxpackage` command along with the `remove-appxpackage` command. The script also used some kind of a filter so that it knew what apps were created by the Visual Studio IDE and which were not so that I could just run it and let the script figure out what to remove and cleanup. I think I put a copy somewhere and I have been trying to find it. If I do, I will post it as an answer along with a link to where I found the original script. I would swear it was a stackoverflow posting from somewhere. – Richard Chambers May 27 '18 at 12:47
  • This may have the answer I am looking for though I don't remember the posting looking like this one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42609860/what-are-those-installed-unknown-programs/42856567#42856567 – Richard Chambers May 27 '18 at 12:57
  • Well your question asked for pinned apps - it does make more sense to remove the whole package if no longer needed. The referenced link will remove all apps installed via development mode. –  May 27 '18 at 13:13
  • @LotPings my question was about automatically installed apps that are appearing on the Start Menu and not about pinned apps. You assumed that it had to do with pinning. I think that this was the stackoverflow posting that I ran across https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38519096/delete-nouientrypoints-designmode-packages/38556174 and the title of both of these postings that seem to apply seem to be totally different from what I am looking for. Sigh. – Richard Chambers May 27 '18 at 13:21
  • @'Richard Chambers', there also is a -AllUsers flag on the Get-AppxPackage, you will need to run it elevated, however. What do you get when running a Get-AppxPackage for one of those apps, what are the fields like? Also the -PackageTypeFilter flag might be of use? – IT M Apr 20 '20 at 06:41
  • Or has this issue already been resolved? – IT M Apr 20 '20 at 06:42
  • @ITM Thank you for the comment and the option suggestion. I have been working on other things so I have put this to one side and not worried about it. This is several years old and my memory on this is hazy. My impression from reviewing the question is that the Start menu was getting cluttered up and the `Remove-AppxPackage` was not removing Start menu items. Are you thinking that the `-AllUsers` flag is needed with the `Get-AppxPackage` command in order to get a full list to remove? I'm not sure if the automatic install of apps by VS is for all users or only current user. – Richard Chambers Apr 20 '20 at 15:04
  • Logically speaking, the app(s) would be installed under the current user. However, if the service that creates that app runs as eg. LOCAL SYSTEM, it might be for all users. But as I've experienced it, this is something that's very hard to automate with PowerShell. `Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*`, `Get-AppXPackage` and `Get-AppPackage` are the only tools. I've solved my issues in the past with a simple batch script running wmic: `wmic product where "name like '%%AppName%%'" call uninstall /nointeractive` – IT M Apr 21 '20 at 06:56
  • Maybe a new version of Visual Studio might be of help as well? – IT M Apr 21 '20 at 06:58

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