Starting in the latest preview release of Visual Studio version 15.2 (26418.1-Preview), you can now find vswhere installed in “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer” (on 32-bit operating systems before Windows 10, you should use “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer”).

While I initially made vswhere.exe available via NuGet and Chocolatey for easy acquisition, some projects do not use package managers nor do most projects want to commit binaries to a git repository (since each version with little compression would be downloaded to every repo without a filter like git LFS).

So starting with build 15.2.26418.1* you can rely on vswhere.exe being installed. We actually install it with the installer, so even if you install a product like Build Tools you can still rely on vswhere.exe being available in “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer”.

* A note about versions: the display version is 15.2.26418.1, but package and binary versions may be 15.0.26418.1. This is an artifact of how we do versioning but are looking to fix the “installationVersion” property you can see with vswhere.exe to match the display version, which you can currently see as part of the “installationName” property like in the following example.

instanceId: 881fd1f9
installDate: 4/20/2017
installationName: VisualStudioPreview/15.2.0-Preview+26418.1.d15rel
installationPath: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Preview\Enterprise
installationVersion: 15.0.26418.1