I introduced vswhere last week as an easy means to locate Visual Studio 2017 and newer, along with other products installed with our new installer that provides faster downloads and installs - even for full installs (which has roughly doubled in size with lots of new third-party content). vswhere was designed to be a fast, small, single-file execu...

After feedback on the VSSetup PowerShell module to query Visual Studio 2017 and related products, I'm pleased to say that a native, single-file executable is available on GitHub: vswhere. The VSSetup PowerShell module is also available on GitHub and provides a number of benefits for PowerShell scripts, but build tools and CMake and deployment scrip...

To make the new setup configuration APIs more accessible to developers, we have published the "VSSetup" PowerShell module on powershellgallery.com, making it quick and easy to install. If you have Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0 or newer - installed with Windows 10 - or PowerShellGet for PowerShell 3.0 or 4.0, you can run the following from...

Visual Studio 2017 has brought big changes to extensibility that allow developers to install extensions to different instances and install dependencies. In support of multiple instances, a fast API was required that tools can use to find and launch Visual Studio and related tools, or to install extensions. I previously published some samples, and ...

We've listened to feedback over the years, and while each new release brought changes to the setup experience of Visual Studio and related products, none have been more significant than what we're doing for Visual Studio "15". New setup engine With Visual Studio supporting so many platforms and toolkits, one of the goals for Visual Studio "15" is t...

Let me preface this by stating I love Visual Studio Code! While I think its big, older brother Visual Studio is great for large solutions or even small projects where project files are managed automatically by the IDE, Code work great for small, loose projects and is very fast. I still use Vim for a lot of quick edits in a console (I spend a lot of...

Many years ago when PowerShell was first in beta, I saw an opportunity to write cmdlets that I could string together in different ways rather than writing and maintaining a bunch of one-off Windows scripts for various day-to-day tasks and customer diagnostics. I created the Windows Installer PowerShell Module to fill that role. These cmdlets are no...

If you have Visual Studio 2015 RTM installed and attempt to install Visual Studio 2015 with Update 1, you may see a failure like the screenshot that reads, KB3022398 This action is only valid for products that are currently installed. This is a fatal error that occurs when upgrading from VS 2015 RTM to the VS 2015 slipstream release. The sli...

When you install Visual Studio and related content like Windows Kits or some add-ons, most packages that comprise those bundles are reference counted to make sure they are not removed prematurely. Uninstalling Visual Studio and related content should eventually remove those packages (i.e. last one out the door turns off the light). Contrast with ol...

If you’ve installed pre-release versions of Visual Studio – or even another edition of the same release – you may find you can’t change the installation target directory. This is because once a set of shared components is installed, we install all the other components to the same directory structure. When you have multiple e...