---
title: "Six things that will happen when you uninstall your MSDN documentation"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2009/8/13/six-things-that-will-happen-when-you-uninstall-your-msdn-doc.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2009/8/13/six-things-that-will-happen-when-you-uninstall-your-msdn-doc.html"
published: "2009-08-13T15:18:47"
updated: "2009-08-13T15:18:47"
tags: [".NET"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "someone asked in a mailing list if there are any repercussions to uninstalling MSDN documentation from their system, since it was taking such a long time to load on F1. my answer: After uninstalling MSDN you will get…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Six things that will happen when you uninstall your MSDN documentation

By Roy Osherove August 13, 2009 In [.NET](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net)

**Historical article** · Originally published August 13, 2009; technical details may be outdated.

someone asked in a mailing list if there are any repercussions to uninstalling MSDN documentation from their system, since it was taking such a long time to load on F1.

**my answer:**

1. After uninstalling MSDN you will get the weird and uncomfortable feeling that things are running a bit smoother
2. pressing F1, however, will still stall your system, though for a little bit less time. Everything else will continue to work just fine, as if MSDN docs never existed.
3. you will also find that whatever it is you were looking for, the closest search engine (ehm google) will find a better match (sometimes within MSDN itself, but mostly much better than MSDN).
4. Your hard drive will also contain a bit more space, which you can then use to install productive tools such as "everything" search engine, "TestDriven.NET" and Total commander :)
5. you will continue to go through life wondering what would have happened if you had just stuck with MSDN a little bit longer
6. but that sinking feeling will soon be replaced by the realization that most of the time, you just don't need to install MSDN anymore. It's almost irrelevant since the info is out there in the cloud anyway. and the fact that you can go get coffee if you accidentally press F1 doesn’t really help its case.

## More in .NET

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---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/