Visual Studio Setup
Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
Latest posts
Configure Visual Studio across your organization with .vsconfig
Add a .vsconfig file to your solution root directory to configure Visual Studio consistently across your organization.
Older versions of Visual Studio 2017 will not install in Windows Server 2019 containers
If you try to install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 into a Windows Server 2019 or newer container image, such as or , the install will quickly terminate without error and without installing anything. This is due, in part, to changes to the Windows Server container image to reduce size and improve startup performance. To install into Windows Server Core 2019 or newer, please download Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 or newer, including Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. Note: all previous Windows container images are now available in the Microsoft Container Registry (MCR), and all new container images includ...
Workaround for 0x8007007e when trying to to locate an instance of Visual Studio
We are investigating how a particular rare problem occurs that can prevent clients like VSIXInstaller.exe, vswhere.exe, and others from finding any Visual Studio instance that results in an error similar to the following: This is the CLSID for the Visual Studio Installer query API, and despite being registered the COM server DLL is missing. Workaround The easiest way to work around this problem is to repair any instance of Visual Studio. Warning: this will reset your Visual Studio settings: Along with resetting your Visual Studio settings, this can take quite a while to complete. A faster wa...
Docker recipes available for Visual Studio Build Tools
Use or contribute your own Dockerfiles on GitHub to help others build similar workloads with Visual Studio Build Tools.
No container image for Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017
The size and permutations of Build Tools 2017 container images are too great to publish official images, but here's how you can create your own tailored images.
vswhere now supports -utf8 to override console code page
You can now force vswhere to output JSON using the UTF-8 encoding.
Updated documentation for Visual Studio Build Tools container
The .NET Framework may not be correctly installed into a Windows Server Core container, and managed code - like the compilers - may fail. The documentation was updated with how to work around this.
vswhere now supports -requiresAny to find instances with one or more components installed
You can now use -requiresAny with vswhere to specify that any component ID passed to -requires will satisfy the query.
Set both x86 and x64 registry views for custom setup policy
Due to a bug in older versions of Visual Studio 2017, you should set the CachePath policy in both 32- and 64-bit views of the registry.