VS Ultimate – leaving a mess

I was poking around my rapidly-filling SSD, wondering exactly what was taking up all the space on my C: drive, when I noticed that the c:\programdata folder was over 2GB in size. That’s not necessarily unusual, except that I’m careful to redirect most applications that would use it to a different drive.

When I looked in more detail, I found that almost all of that 2GB was in one place: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Visual Studio\10.0\TraceDebugging

That’s where Visual Studio stores its Intellitrace dump files – and it seems it’s not cleaning up after itself! Some of the files were over a year old, and I’m pretty confident there’s no useful debugging to be done with them now ;-)

The VS options allow a maximum size per recording, but it seems they’ll let the overall folder grow without limit. Worth knowing – and worth keeping an eye on if you’re short of disc!