get-vs2017-path

get-vs2017-path

Try to find the VS2017 buildtools path via COM or registry

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As of VS7 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2017) Microsoft recommends to query the VS setup state via COM, but not everybody is fluent in COM, and not every language has COM bindings, so I created some scripts that utilize Windows builtin tools to query this information. The resolved information is printed to stdout in JSON, e.g.

[16:32:02.47] C:\code\0tni\get-vs2017-path>tools\try_powershell.cmd
[{
"Product": "Enterprise",
"InstallationPath": "C:\\VS\\2017\\Enterprise",
"Version": "15.0.26206.0",
"SDK": "10.0.14393.795",
"CmdPath": "C:\\VS\\2017\\Enterprise\\Common7\\Tools\\VsDevCmd.bat"
},{
"Product": "BuildTools",
"InstallationPath": "C:\\VS\\2017\\BuildTools",
"Version": "15.0.26206.0",
"SDK": "10.0.14393.795",
"CmdPath": "C:\\VS\\2017\\BuildTools\\Common7\\Tools\\VsDevCmd.bat"
}]
[16:32:04.43] C:\code\0tni\get-vs2017-path>

There are 3 scripts

1. try_powershell.cmd will try to JIT compile some C# code that calls COM, and prints the interesting stuff to stdio
2. compile-run.cmd will try to find a C# compiler to compile the query then run the generated exe
3. try_registry.cmd will look for undocumented registry traces