Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Configure Visual Studio across your organization with .vsconfig

April 3, 2019 Apr 3, 2019 04/3/19

Heath Stewart

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

December 10, 2018 Dec 10, 2018 12/10/18

Heath Stewart

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 ...

Workaround for 0x8007007e when trying to to locate an instance of Visual Studio

November 14, 2018 Nov 14, 2018 11/14/18

Heath Stewart

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: (image) This is the CLSID for the Visual Studio Installer query API, and despite being registered the COM server DLL...

Docker recipes available for Visual Studio Build Tools

August 8, 2018 Aug 8, 2018 08/8/18

Heath Stewart

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

June 14, 2018 Jun 14, 2018 06/14/18

Heath Stewart

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

June 13, 2018 Jun 13, 2018 06/13/18

Heath Stewart

You can now force vswhere to output JSON using the UTF-8 encoding.

Updated documentation for Visual Studio Build Tools container

April 18, 2018 Apr 18, 2018 04/18/18

Heath Stewart

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.