Today was one of those days again. You know, one of these days when Visual Studio keeps freezing up on you and you decide to finally do something about it.
After a few hours disabling extensions to no effect, and comparing with my other laptop where VS is working without issue I decided to do a fresh reinstall of my laptop. Windows, all programs, everything.
Cleaning Windows
Everything I need is on my secondary disk so I did a windows refresh: just type “reset” in Start and follow the breadcrumbs:
Alternatively, you can download the Windows iso manually from your msdn benefits page. Next, we wait..
Scripted installation
After reinstalling my laptop a few times it became time to do it differently. I now use a nifty program called Chocolatey to install my favourite programs. Chocolatey is in fact little more than a wrapper around PowerShell and NuGET, and you can read more about it here.
I will be using this tool and a little PowerShell script I keep on GitHub. Whenever I find a tool I like I will check if there is a Chocolatey package for it, and if so I will add it to my script.
Restartable
While everything was installing I received a few errors, especially when the Visual Studio workloads were installing. It turned out that all it needed was a reboot, so when you get an error, just reboot and rerun the script: it will recognize if a module has already been installed and continue with the next install until it’s done.
That’s it for today. I’m going outside for a little evening run…