Indicators missing! Uninstalled extension by mistake.

I was trying to troubleshoot a problem (which I have since figured out) and in the process, I manually uninstalled the nCrunch extension via visual studio's extension manager. Now my ncrunch indicators (green, red, & black dots) are missing, and I don't know how to get them back.

I assume I have to install the extension again, but I can't figure out how to do that, and uninstalling & reinstalling ncrunch doesn't help :(

Hi, thanks for posting!

My assumption is that you're running VS2010, so please do correct me if I need to revise these instructions.

When you uninstall a VS extension using the extension manager, it will immediately disable the extension by marking it for deletion. This creates a somewhat unusual state where the extensions files are still installed (in NCrunch's case these will be under Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Remco Software\NCrunch for Visual Studio 2010), but the IDE refuses to load them because of the deletion flag.

The IDE deletion flag is stored in your registry under 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ExtensionManager\PendingDeletions'. It appears as though there is likely to be other state elsewhere, so removing this flag won't solve your problem. I suggest the following:

1. Open an explorer window browsing to the NCrunch files under your VS installation
2. Check for the existence of the deletion flag in your registry (leave Regedit open to keep an eye on it)
3. Close ALL instances of Visual Studio
4. Reopen Visual Studio, open a random project
5. Close down Visual Studio without changing anything
6. Observe the deletion flag and explorer window. If Visual Studio has behaved according to how it did in my own testing, the files should be deleted and the deletion flag should no longer exist in the registry
7. You can now uninstall-reinstall/repair your NCrunch installation from the NCrunch MSI

I hope this helps.


Cheers,

Remco

Interesting. I assumed there was something hanging around in the registry, but I couldn't find where. I tried your steps, but the registry entry didn't delete, so I deleted it myself, repaired NCrunch, and then it made me reboot. Everything seems to be working now.. thanks!