Heath Stewart

New vswhere: now with more properties!

October 12th, 2017

Read about all the new properties output by vswhere.

Installing Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 in a Docker container

September 18th, 2017

Follow this guidance to install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 into a Docker container and save the image for later.

Cleaning up corrupt Visual Studio instances

September 1st, 2017

When older versions of Visual Studio 2017 report an error about not being able to load the instance, follow these instructions to clean up corrupt instances and re-install.

vswhere version 2.0 released

June 24th, 2017

A new major version of vswhere is released with the breaking change to filter out preview releases by default.

Disabling or moving the Visual Studio 2017 package cache is now generally available

May 10th, 2017

With the release of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2, the ability to disable or move the package cache is now generally available and documented. Basically, payloads are removed after being installed or repaired, and we will download them again if ever needed (like when repairing the product instance). This does mean if you work offline and nee

Documentation now live for moving or disabling the package cache

May 4th, 2017

I previously wrote about moving or disabling the package cache for Visual Studio 2017, which is a feature in the latest preview of Visual Studio 2017 and will be generally available update 15.2 is released. We have now published the documentation along with related material for administrators or developers looking to take more control of thei

vswhere is now installed with Visual Studio 2017

April 21st, 2017

Starting in the latest preview release of Visual Studio version 15.2 (26418.1-Preview), you can now find vswhere installed in "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer" (on 32-bit operating systems before Windows 10, you should use "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer"). While I initially made vswhere.exe available v

Cleaning up the Visual Studio 2017 package cache

April 19th, 2017

With the ability to disable or move the package cache for Visual Studio 2017 and other products installed with the new installer, packages are removed for whatever instance(s) you are installing, modifying, or repairing. If you have a lot of instances and want to clean all of them up easily from the command line - perhaps scripting it for u

Moving or disabling the package cache for Visual Studio 2017

April 17th, 2017

In the latest preview release of Visual Studio we are introducing the ability to disable (or re-enable) the package cache, or move it to another drive. This can be done using the command line or the registry, which can be deployed on a domain using group policy. This will be generally available in Visual Studio in a few weeks - scheduled for t

vswhere now searches older versions of Visual Studio

March 11th, 2017

One of the top requests I kept hearing for vswhere was to also search older versions of Visual Studio. You can now do that starting with the latest release. Even if you don't have Visual Studio 2017 or newer installed - which means the query API is not even registered - you can use vswhere to find the installation root directory for Visual