Resetting the experimental instance of Visual Studio has changed in 2026 (v18)

Updated Jan 7th 2026 -- see below

If you build extensions for Visual Studio, you'll know that sometimes (frequently?--depending on what you're doing) it's necessary to completely reset the experimental instance to get it back to a known/good state.

With previous versions, it was possible to start typing in the main Windows menu and it would find the command to do this for you.

This was possible because the menu included entries for just this command:

(Note that I have multiple entries because I have multiple long-term support versions installed for testing.)

However, VS2026 does not include these menu entries. (Who knows why they were removed...?)

Instead, you can (must) trigger the resetting of the experimental instance from within Visual Studio from within the Feature Search. Simply start typing the command in the search box, and it'll find it for you.

Note. I couldn't find another way to access this functionality in VS2026. If you know of one, please share it.

UPDATE - Jan 7th 2026

I can no longer get the above to work, as the feature search no longer finds the option.
I asked Copilot and it said the only way to do it was via the command line.

Take this with a pinch of salt though, as the above includes incorrect information about the version number as VS2026 is version 18!