How to remove unused tags on Visual Studio Online

For all those who have been dealing with Visual Studio Online tags, you know, creating a tag it’s simple. Just write the string in the related area:

Tags will be stored in the team project. Picking a tag is also quicker:

Unfortunately, deleting a tag is not an option available in the Visual Studio Online UI. Someone says that removing all the linked items will remove also the tags, but this is not true in VSO. This can be a good design choice, because we cannot say when a tag is really unused. Is it new? Is it old? Is it waiting to be reused? So, we need to choose when remove the tag and what tag must be completely removed.

Here comes the “Tag Admin For Visual Studio” extension, available for 2013 and 2015. The package can be installed via Visual Studio Gallery or directly on the Visual Studio IDE using “Extensions and Updates..” window.

After the setup, you will find a new item on the Team Explorer:

At the startup the tool will load the list of stored tags. For each tag we can do the following options:

• Go to the linked items
• Rename (just for a single tag)
• Remove

We were looking for the “Remove” option:

After a message, we can delete all the tags, also when they’re related to backlog items.

The autocomplete will not show any deleted tag (refresh the pages if you see them again):

That’s it!

You can download the extension here:

Tag Admin for Visual Studio 2013
Tag Admin for Visual Studio 2015

Stay Tuned! 🙂