April 13th, 2015

Detection keys for Visual Studio 2015

Heath Stewart
Principal Software Engineer

Administrators and developers who need to detect whether Visual Studio 2015 is installed can use similar registry keys as with past releases. This time around, though, we’ve made some changes to the lineup of products but the registry scheme remains the same.

Most of the detection keys are found in the 32-bit registry hive – the ones you’ll typically want to detect, anyway.

  • Core: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DevDiv\<Family>\Servicing\<Version>\<Edition>
  • Language pack: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DevDiv\<Family>\Servicing\<Version>\<Edition>\<LCID>

Following is a table of the products we’ve announced.

Family Edition
VS Community
Professional
Enterprise

The biggest change to the detection keys is that Enterprise replaces Premium and Ultimate. Community is also a subset of Professional which is a subset of Enterprise, so if you you have some dependency on a feature in Community, for example (like the ability to add extensions), you can detect all three “VS” family products by checking for Community like so:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\14.0\Community

The registry values we store in either key are as follows.

Name Type Description
Install REG_DWORD Value of 1 means this edition is installed.
InstallerType REG_SZ Typically “MSI”.
SP REG_DWORD Previously the SP level. No longer used with the VSUpdate model.
SPIndex REG_DWORD Previously the SP pre-release iteration. No longer used with the VSUpdate model.
SPName REG_SZ Always “RTM” with the VSUpdate model.
UpdateVersion REG_SZ The RTM or installed VSUpdate version.
Version REG_SZ The RTM version.

These changes go into effect with Visual Studio 2015 RC. I’ll update this page should we make any further changes for RTM.

Author

Heath Stewart
Principal Software Engineer

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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