Visual Studio Setup
Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
Latest posts
Moving or disabling the package cache for Visual Studio 2017
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. This will be generally available in Visual Studio in a few weeks - scheduled for the 15.2 update - but we want to give you a preview and collect feedback on the feature. Command line If you pass to the installer - even if just starting the installer - the cache policy is set to disable caching of packages, and any modification or repair of an instance wi...
vswhere now searches older versions of Visual Studio
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 - which means the query API is not even registered - you can use vswhere to find the installation root directory for Visual Studio 2010 and newer. There are some caveats: All the other vswhere parameters that control the output format and selection still work. For example, if you wanted to find the path to the latest version of Visual Studio 2010 through Visual Studio 2014. O...
Fast acquisition of vswhere
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 executable you could download and even redistribute in a build pipeline or for other uses. To make this easy to acquire, I've published both a NuGet package and made vswhere available via Chocolatey. [code gutter="false"]choco install vswhere vswhere -latest -products * -re...
vswhere Available
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 scripts wanted a simple executable they could redistribute without spawning PowerShell. You can enumerate instances with optional demands on which products, workloads, and components; and on which versions you require. Results can be printed in a variety of formats - curren...
Visual Studio Setup PowerShell Module Available
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 even an unelevated PowerShell host: You can also install for all users if you leave off the parameter entirely. You can also download and extract a ZIP archive from our Releases page on the project page. After installing, you can quickly enumerate all launchable ins...
Documentation available for the Setup Configuration API
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 now documentation for these APIs is available. The documentation is based on the runtime-callable wrapper (RCW) - the .NET interop assemblies - for the native configuration API. The main difference is that the native API will return an while the RCW will throw a where...
Changes to Visual Studio “15” Setup
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 to provide choice and install just what you need. To make it easier for our partners to author component packages for Visual Studio while making sure you get all the required components, an underlying engine needs to provide granularity and cohesion with dependencies. Ex...
Insert GUIDs directly into Visual Studio Code
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 time in powershell.exe even when using Visual Studio for development) but Code has quickly been filling that niche for source code in various languages. But when frequently having to author GUIDs for something-or-other, my routine of generating GUIDs in different form...
Get the Windows Installer PowerShell Module easier with WMF 5.0
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 now used heavily in many tasks internally and, I hope, in the wild.Fast-forward to today – with the release of the Windows Management Framework 5.0, which includes PowerShell and a host of other great administrative features – you can get new versions of the m...