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devenv.exe /SafeMode and add-ins in Visual Studio 2005 / 2008

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Just a curious difference in behavior between Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 that the MSDN documentation doesn’t cover very well:

According to the MSDN documentation of VS 2005, “This switch prevents all third-party VSPackages from loading when Visual Studio starts, thus ensuring stable execution.” One would expect that if third-party VSPackages are not loaded, add-ins would be also excluded from loading, but they aren’t, they are loaded.

Visual Studio 2008 works as expected and the whole Add-in Manager is disabled.

2 thoughts on “devenv.exe /SafeMode and add-ins in Visual Studio 2005 / 2008”

  1. Not all add-ins get disabled though. An example is Resharper (and I think PowerCommands, but not sure).

  2. Ahh… That would explain why I still get add-in errors when trying to start with /SafeMode! 😉

    But… is there ANY way to disable the add-ins, then…?

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