Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Configure Visual Studio across your organization with .vsconfig

Heath StewartApril 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19

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

Heath StewartDecember 10, 2018Dec 10, 201812/10/18

If you try to install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017 into a Windows Server 2019 or newer container image, such as mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:1809 or mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019, the install will quickly terminate without error and without installing anything. This is due, in part, to changes to the Windows Serve

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

Heath StewartNovember 14, 2018Nov 14, 201811/14/18

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: This is the CLSID for the Visual Studio Installer query API, and despite being registered the COM server DLL is miss

Docker recipes available for Visual Studio Build Tools

Heath StewartAugust 8, 2018Aug 8, 201808/8/18

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

Heath StewartJune 14, 2018Jun 14, 201806/14/18

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

Heath StewartJune 13, 2018Jun 13, 201806/13/18

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

Updated documentation for Visual Studio Build Tools container

Heath StewartApril 18, 2018Apr 18, 201804/18/18

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

Heath StewartJanuary 25, 2018Jan 25, 201801/25/18

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

Heath StewartNovember 8, 2017Nov 8, 201711/8/17

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

Heath StewartOctober 24, 2017Oct 24, 201710/24/17

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