How do I remove a project configuration in Visual Studio 2008?

I have a Visual Studio 2008 solution into which I have imported a number of pre-existing projects. The projects are mixed-language sample code (C#, VB, C++/CLI). They currently have multiple configurations, but I want each project only to have only a single "Debug" configuration.

In the configuration manager, I deleted the other configurations (e.g. "Release"), but as I did so there was a warning message to tell me that they would not be deleted from the individual projects.

And indeed when I navigate to an individual project, it still has "Release" and other configurations, even though at the solution level there is only "Debug".

How can I best remove these extra configurations from each project? Am I overlooking some way to do this in the GUI, or should I just edit the project files directly?

In the Configuration Manager, select "Edit..." in the "Configuration" column for each project (not via the dropdown named Active solution configuration) that has configurations you want to remove.

In the dialog that pops up, mark each unwanted configuration and select "Remove".

The best way to automate the removal a configuration from all the projects of a solution is done by using Nuget console command to access visual studio apis.

Go to Tools, Nuget Package Manager, Package Manager Console.

From there use:

Get-Project -All | Foreach { $_.ConfigurationManager.DeleteConfigurationRow("Release") }

In this way you have removed all the configurations from all the projects called "Release". I strongly suggest you to always check the differences on your source code versioning sistem, you will see only csproj and in some cases sln files affected, if you are using configuration transformations (like Web.Release.config) they will still be there.

Further information are available on the visual studio version-specific api documentation here, this works from at least VS 2015 for C++, C#, F#, VB languages.

To help illustrate timbo's answer, here is what he's talking about. Like some of the commenters it took me a while to find this.

Doesn't answer this particular question I know but with VS2013 you can open the Property Manager tab, expand all project configurations, do multiple selection using the CTRL or SHIFT keys and delete configurations from multiple projects at once.

In VS2017/VS2019, if you drop down the "Active solution configuration", there is an <edit> there that lets you remove a configuration from all projects.

Screenshot showing <edit>