Heath Stewart

Senior Software Engineer, Azure SDK

Heath is an application architect and developer, looking to help educate others to learn professional development. Besides designing and developing applications he enjoys writing about intermediate and advanced topics. Heath also consults for deployment packages and scenarios within Microsoft and for external customers.

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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 ...

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: (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

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.

How to install Builds Tools in a Docker container

Preview new documentation for how to install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 into a Docker container.