How to disable task launch explorer in Visual Studio?

Question

Task Runner Explorer simply causes errors for me in Visual Studio 2015 RC, and I just want to disable it and run the gulp file from the command line, as always. Is there any way to disable task launch explorer?

Answer 1

In the end, I was able to solve the problem of disabling any unnecessary Visual Studio package in a clean and minimally invasive way that does not require changing the VS configuration files or messing with the registry! This includes the Run Runner tool, the VsHub tool that causes a lot of VS instability and slowdown, as well as any other 150+ VS package it comes with.

Here is a brief overview: The main component of functionality for VS is a package (do not mix it with NuGet packages - this is not relevant here). All extensions that you can install from the Internet (as well as many pre-installed) are presented as VSIX, which is an extended package format. Visual Studio has an API (unpublished, but still) that can work with VSIX packages, including finding them and turning them on / off. Unfortunately, it can only process VSIX and does not see pure VS packets. This is declared by design - pure VS packages are considered system components and do not support a way to disable them. Or so they say ... I decompiled the official (albeit badly outdated) MS plug-in for diagnosing extensions and found that it works a lot with the registry to get information about installed VSPackages, but it doesn’t even try to change anything (I think, turn it off ) My own research at HKCU \ Software \ Microsoft \ VisualStudio found that a huge and complex data structure is useless for violin, since it is just a VS internal state cache, which VS is updated randomly and often, so even if we find out how to disable a package through the registry would be pointless since VS would rewrite it right away.

The two keys that finally led me to the final solution were as follows: 1. File C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0 \ Common7 \ IDE \ devenv.pkgdef The contents of this file are not particularly interesting, but my past is C + + gave me a hint that if there is PkgDef, there is a good chance that PkgUnDef may also be, although usually it is not. ProcMon confirmed that during startup VS checks for the existence of the devenv.pkgundef file, and I was on the right track. 2. The second hint. I know that some other products (I think SQL Server Management Studio) use the VS Shell masking (so you still see VS 2010 in Add / Remove programs - this is an SQL message). And these other products, obviously, have the ability to disable most of the VS features and leave only some of the features they really need. So I found out how they do it, and here you are again - the pkgundef file!

Several probes and registries have been considered to write the right content for devenv.PkgUnDef to get rid of packages that I don't like, with no visible side effects or bad consequences.

My C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0 \ Common7 \ IDE \ devenv.pkgundef files look like this:

// Exclude TaskRunnerExplorer [$RootKey$\Packages\{b483c4e7-43a6-4f7b-a9a1-79e2c5d12148}] // Exclude VsHubServicePackage [$RootKey$\Packages\{F419E6BB-F72F-42CF-ACFE-D0D0E17FCB17}] // Exclude JavaScriptWebExtensionsPackage [$RootKey$\Packages\{30db8f9b-ec9f-44d6-b377-83c7c27a1a8b}] 

To check which specific packages you downloaded, Extension Analyzer . It is quite outdated, so I hacked a version that works with VS 2015 here .

Another way to see what VS is slowing down is to run it with the / Log option and apply the Activity Log Provider .

Hope this helps people recover their thin and fast Visual Studio! Konstantin

Answer 2

The links below explain how to disable packages (extensions) built into Visual Studio.

Basically:

• Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Web Tools .
• Backing up the extension.vsixmanifest file and the TaskRunnerExplorer directory.
• Look in the TaskRunnerExplorer\*.pkg files and pay attention to the GUID keys at the top of the files (for example, [$RootKey$\Packages\{b483c4e7-43a6-4f7b-a9a1-79e2c5d12148}] ).
• Edit the extension.vsixmanifest file and remove the mention of TaskRunnerExplorer.
• Delete the TaskRunnerExplorer directory.
• Backing up and deleting GUID keys from the registry, inside HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0_Config\Packages\ . Currently, these keys are {8da206d4-9521-4f38-92c9-a8d5d0af611c} and {b483c4e7-43a6-4f7b-a9a1-79e2c5d12148} .

Note. To edit files in Program Files (x86) , you need to either run the notepad application in administrator mode, or edit a copy from your own directory and then overwrite the original.

http://blog.spinthemoose.com/2012/12/28/how-to-unregister-a-visual-studio-package-extension/

http://blog.spinthemoose.com/2013/01/02/the-correct-way-to-uninstall-visual-studio-packages-extensions/

Answer 3

I am having problems with Visual Studio 2015 that are deploying a giant instance of node.exe , over and over again when I open our website solution. This caused the use of nannyware McAfee and the Dell encryption software that they installed in our dev blocks to go crazy.

Between all this, he pretty much consumed the entire processor. Needless to say, this made him ... difficult ... to succeed.

So, I need to think about things, and I thought that if I can gulp node , npm and gulp , they, at least, will not be able to use any processor. So, I wrote about the simplest console console applications that you can imagine. My own versions

• node.exe
• gulp.exe
• npm.exe
• and npm.cmd , which just ran my npm.exe , passing its long command line arguments.

The only thing that each of these executable files does is use log4net and write a line to the log file with the name of the executable file and a listing of the arguments with which the executable was called. I parked 4 of them in the directory myself and used this post

• http://ryanhayes.net/synchronize-node-js-install-version-with-visual-studio-2015/

to configure Visual Studio 2015 so that my cropped executables are at the top of the search path.

WELL ...

It turns out that Visual Studio 2015 repeatedly called npm as follows:

 npm ls -g 

So, I went to the root of our project and executed the same command (using real binaries). And so, npm threw and reported errors, trying to open a nonexistent package.json located in the tree root in

 C:\Users\{user-id}\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules 

It seems that he remained unchanged, leaving empty directories there. As soon as I deleted the empty directories where he tried to open the nonexistent package.json , life is good.

NOTE. . Someone requested stub executables, which I describe here using a comment. You can find the source code for them on Github at https://github.com/nbcarey/vs2015-node-stubs/

Enjoy.

Answer 4

In Visual Studio 2015, you can prevent Gulp from starting in every assembly.

• Open task launch explorer
• Click on the "Bindings" tab (shown below).
• Select any entries in the tree and click Delete

When this is done, the binding tree should look like zeros after each top-level element.

---

Note that making the above changes through the user interface ultimately removes the elements from gulpfile.js itself, so you can just as easily make this change by deleting something similar:

 /// <binding AfterBuild='default' /> /// <binding Clean='clean' /> 

Answer 5

This is not "in Visual Studio", but you can open gulpfile.js and delete the generated line at the top of the file. You may also need to reload the solution after this, I'm not sure.

I came here to find the answer, and just noticed that a new line appeared in my gulpfile.js. I searched when it started, and it turned out that when I upgraded my Azure SDK to version 2.7 and started using RTM for Visual Studio 2015, it entered this line in my gulpfile.

If someone finds a way to do this through Visual Studio, rather than hacking the generated lines in a file, I would also like to know.

Answer 6

Open the Task Launch panel and turn off all On Build actions.