#Windows10 – Cleaning some disk space, Windows SDK and #dotnetcore installs

Hi!

I’m very careful with my disk space, however my C: drive in Windows 10 started to claim about low space. I got 3 disks on my machine, 2 SSDs and a regular one; and I always check to install all my software on my D: drive. So, that’s why running low space on C: was shocking.

So, I did a small check on the apps and contents using a lot of disk and I found 2 main sources

Windows 10 SDKs
DotNet Core SDKs and Runtimes

Every time a new version of Windows 10 is released, and I build a Windows 10 App, I get a new Windows SDK. Each one is around 2GBs, I got almost 20, so make your numbers.

Windows 10 Settings App and Features Apps sizes

Note: There is a cool feature to find usage space of installed apps by this, out of the box in Windows Settings.

The second one was related to .Net Core. I had a lot of versions installed, and every time I get a new update on Visual Studio 2019, it seems that I’m updating also my .Net Core SDKs. Right now, I only care about .Net Core 3, so it was time to uninstall all the others.

The official documentation ” How to remove the .NET Core Runtime and SDK” (see references) wasn’t very helpful. However, it was a good source to learn more about dotnet command, specially this one:

C:\> dotnet --list-sdks

This command list all the installed SDKs, and with a little of PowerShell scripting I manage to uninstall almost everything. Once I started this path, I also realize that the

$app.Uninstall()

command was not working, so a little search pointed me into an old article from Scott Hanselman, where he did a similar script to remove old .Net Core versions (see references).

The final script is

	# get installed dotNet SDKs
	$dnSDKs = dotnet —list–sdks

	Write-Host "—————————"
	Write-Host "Installed SDKs:"
	foreach ($dnSDK in $dnSDKs) {
	Write-Host $dnSDK
	}
	Write-Host "—————————"

	foreach ($dnSDK in $dnSDKs) {
	# get sdk information
	$dnSDKSplit = $dnSDK.Split('[', [System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)
	$dnSDKVersion = $dnSDKSplit[0]
	$dnSDKPath = $dnSDKSplit[1].replace(']', '')

	Write-Host " >> Version = " $dnSDKVersion
	Write-Host " >> Path = " $dnSDKPath

	# uninstall sdk, all but 3.0
	if($dnSDKVersion.StartsWith("3.")) {
	Write-Host " Keep Version = " $dnSDKVersion
	}
	else {
	Write-Host " Uninstalling Version = " $dnSDKVersion
	$dnAppName = "Microsoft .NET Core SDK – " + $dnSDKVersion

	$app = Get-WmiObject –Class Win32_Product \| Where-Object {
	$_.Name -match $dnSDKVersion
	}
	Write-Host $app.Name
	Write-Host $app.IdentifyingNumber
	# official not working
	# $app.Uninstall()
	# test with Hanselman mode
	pushd $env:SYSTEMROOT\System32
	$app.identifyingnumber \|% { Start-Process msiexec –wait –ArgumentList "/x $_" }
	}
	}