TOOLS

As the development pendulum has swung back to the “front end,” I find a majority of my time in VS Code. Back in the early days of VS Code, I missed the rich toolset of Visual Studio, but as I became more comfortable with the combination of command line and graphical interfaces in VS Code, as well as the explosion of awesome extensions for VS Code, I found myself opening Visual Studio less and less. (Honestly, when I open Visual Studio these days, it’s because the icon is next to VS Code in my taskbar and I accidentally click the wrong one. As long as it’s open, I apply the latest updates and close it back down.)

I recently found myself in a situation on a client’s device where I needed to remove an application, but I was not a local administrator on the device. After evaluating options (like the slow WMI client), I turned to PowerShell. PowerShell provides a simple and fast way to search for and uninstall MSI-installed applications.

Skip to the code!

After exploring a few options, including the glacially slow WMI client, I decided to turn to my old friend PowerShell. And voilà! PowerShell provides a simple and fast way to search for and remove applications.