How many times have you had a project (or solution) in Visual Studio’s MRU list that you didn’t want? Maybe it was a project you opened by mistake, or maybe it was something you only needed in rare circumstances. Whatever the reason, did you also try looking for an option in Visual Studio that would allow you to delete those MRU entries? I’ve been in the same situation and, unfortunately, I had no luck finding a way to delete a specific entry in the list. At least, not directly through Visual Studio.

In this post I’ll show you a hack that will allow specific entries to be deleted. It requires a few registry modifications and isn’t the cleanest solution, but at least it gets the job done. If you know of another way to do this directly through Visual Studio then, by all means, please leave a comment.

The first thing you’ll need to do is open one of the following registry keys:

• Visual Studio Express for C++: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\9.0\ProjectMRUList
• Visual Studio Express for C#: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\9.0\ProjectMRUList
• Visual Studio Professional: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList

It will look something similar to this:

Here you’ll see paths to each of your MRU projects. The entry which appears first in Visual Studio’s list is labeled “File1,” the second is “File2,” etc. Simply delete whichever entry holds the path to the project you don’t want. If you’re deleting the last entry, you can stop here. Otherwise, you’ll have to rename all successive entries such that the numbering is consecutive.

Once you’ve deleted the entry or entries representing your project(s), open a new instance of Visual Studio – notice how the MRU list just got shorter! 😉

-Greg Dolley

*Get new posts automatically! Grab the RSS feed here. Want email updates instead? Click here.