Visual Studio takes 31 GB, and most of it is workloads you never chose

Visual Studio is almost always the largest single thing on a Windows development machine, and the number in Settings, Apps is not the number on the disk.

Where it all is

Workloads are where the 31 GB is

A default install of the desktop workload is a few gigabytes. What takes it to thirty is ticking boxes: mobile, game development, Azure, data science. Each pulls in its own SDKs and emulators, and nothing prompts you to review them afterwards.

1. Open Visual Studio Installer.
2. Choose Modify on the installed version.
3. Read the Installation details panel on the right, which lists every component with its size.
4. Untick workloads you have not used this year, then Modify.

That panel is the single most useful screen for this, and it is two clicks from the Start menu and almost nobody opens it.

The caches, in order of what they cost

# Per solution caches across every project
Get-ChildItem C:\ -Recurse -Directory -Filter .vs -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
  ForEach-Object {
    $s = (Get-ChildItem $_.FullName -Recurse -Force -File -EA SilentlyContinue | Measure-Object Length -Sum).Sum
    [PSCustomObject]@{ MB = [math]::Round($s/1MB); Path = $_.FullName }
  } | Sort-Object MB -Descending | Select-Object -First 15

A .vs folder holds the IntelliSense database for that solution and is rebuilt from the source when the solution reopens. On a large solution it is hundreds of megabytes, and across a folder of repositories it adds up faster than the IDE itself.

The bin and obj folders beside them

Get-ChildItem C:\ -Recurse -Directory -Include bin,obj -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
  Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) } |
  ForEach-Object { [PSCustomObject]@{ Path = $_.FullName } } | Select-Object -First 20

Build output older than three months belongs to a project you are not working on, and it is regenerated by the next build. That is the same rule as every other toolchain, covered for the ecosystem generally in the NuGet and .NET caches.

Uninstalling a version you no longer open

The Visual Studio Installer can remove an older version entirely, and it also has a cleanup for orphaned package cache entries left by versions already gone. Removing the application through Settings, Apps leaves more behind than using its own installer does, which is the opposite of the usual advice on Windows.