Changing Visual Studio shortcut name and Installer entry

Do you hate seeing “Visual Studio… (2)” as much as I do? Do you feel angry every time it comes back again (after update) in spite of all your manual changes? Don’t worry — I have the solution just for you.

The most important thing to know — two (in (2)) is the nickname of the instance. Now we just need to find and remove (or change) it.

In order to change or remove the nickname of a Visual Studio 2022 installation:

1. Set the nickname in the *.isolation.ini files in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\[Version]\Common7\IDE\ (look for Nickname= )
2. Set the nickname in the state.json file in %ProgramData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Packages\state.json (look for “nickname”:)
3. Now you can change shortcut names manually and those changes would persist

References:

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