Heath Stewart

Read about all the new properties output by vswhere.

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

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.

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

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).

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 their installations,

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 via NuGet and Chocolatey for easy acquisition,

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 –

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.

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 –