The latest release of vswhere now outputs additional properties as requested, along with catalog properties and a way to disambiguate nested properties – not that there are any currently. You can specify the nested properties followed by a property name like “properties/nickname”. Delimiters supported are “_”, “/”, and “.” to fit with the text, JSON, and XML formats. You can use any delimiter with any format, however.

The default output for an instance now looks like:

[
  {
    "instanceId": "890353f3",
    "installDate": "2017-09-16T01:24:28Z",
    "installationName": "VisualStudio/15.4.0+27004.2002",
    "installationPath": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Enterprise",
    "installationVersion": "15.4.27004.2002",
    "productId": "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Product.Enterprise",
    "productPath": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Enterprise\\Common7\\IDE\\devenv.exe",
    "isPrerelease": false,
    "displayName": "Visual Studio Enterprise 2017",
    "description": "Microsoft DevOps solution for productivity and coordination across teams of any size",
    "channelId": "VisualStudio.15.Release",
    "channelPath": "C:\\Users\\heaths\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\Packages\\_Channels\\4CB340F5\\catalog.json",
    "channelUri": "https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/channel",
    "enginePath": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\Installer\\resources\\app\\ServiceHub\\Services\\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Setup.Service",
    "releaseNotes": "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=660692#15.4.0",
    "thirdPartyNotices": "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=660708",
    "catalog": {
      "buildBranch": "d15svc",
      "buildVersion": "15.4.27004.2002",
      "id": "VisualStudio/15.4.0+27004.2002",
      "localBuild": "build-lab",
      "manifestName": "VisualStudio",
      "manifestType": "installer",
      "productDisplayVersion": "15.4.0",
      "productLine": "Dev15",
      "productLineVersion": "2017",
      "productMilestone": "RTW",
      "productMilestoneIsPreRelease": "False",
      "productName": "Visual Studio",
      "productPatchVersion": "0",
      "productPreReleaseMilestoneSuffix": "6.0",
      "productRelease": "RTW",
      "productSemanticVersion": "15.4.0+27004.2002"
    },
    "properties": {
      "campaignId": "844478574.1505524861",
      "channelManifestId": "VisualStudio.15.Release/15.4.0+27004.2002",
      "nickname": "",
      "setupEngineFilePath": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\Installer\\vs_installershell.exe"
    }
  }
]

Most of the properties are provided through the ISetupPropertyStore. This interface is implemented by ISetupInstance objects, and provided by ISetupInstance2::GetProperties for custom properties. Starting with Visual Studio 2017 Update 3, you can also get catalog properties by calling IUnknown::QueryInterface on an ISetupInstance object for ISetupInstanceCatalog, which also provides an ISetupPropertyStore from ISetupInstanceCatalog::GetProperties. As we add new features that require persisting properties, they will automatically be exposed.