FInding the path where Visual Studio is Installed

Question

How I can find the path where Microsoft visual Studio is installed. I need to use that path in my program.

What is the function that has to be called or what other method can I use to get the path where Microsoft Visual Studio is installed?

Noelianoell

Answer 1

Depending on the app, it's probably best to ask the user, but here's some C# code that should do the trick for VS2008.

RegistryKey regKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Setup\VS");
string vsInstallationPath = regKey.GetValue("ProductDir").ToString();
regKey.Close();

Drabbet

Answer 2

It is probably possible to find it by searching the registry, but as I wanted a solution for build scripts I have been using environment variables to do this.

N.B. The name of the environment variable to query is version specific.

For VS2005 you can use VS80COMNTOOLS

For VS2008 you can use VS90COMNTOOLS

If you type SET VS90COMNTOOLS at a command prompt you should see: VS90COMNTOOLS=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools\

so go up two folders to get to the root of the install path.

Devise

Answer 3

This is the quickest way to know the folder where VS is installed or any other program.

Open VS code and when it is running; open the Windows Task Manager and navigate to the Details tab.

Right-click on the Code.exe application that should be running by now and choose the option to Open File Location:

Windows Task Manager > Details Tab > RIGHTCLICK Code.exe > Open File Location

Riggins

OP was asking for Visual Studio, not VSCode – Bova

Answer 4

If you are wanting a command shell to use with the command line Visual Studio tools, the easiest way is to use the Developer Command Prompt tool that is installed when you install Visual Studio. There are several versions of this tool and it will set up the compile environment. See Use the Microsoft C++ toolset from the command line.

The vswhere tool that is installed by recent versions of the Visual Studio installer can be used to generate a list of the installed Visual Studio versions. The GitHub repository is located at https://github.com/microsoft/vswhere and it has this to say:

Over the years Visual Studio could be discovered using registry keys, but with recent changes to the deployment and extensibility models a new method is needed to discover possibly more than one installed instance. These changes facilitate a smaller, faster default install complimented by on-demand install of other workloads and components.

vswhere is designed to be a redistributable, single-file executable that can be used in build or deployment scripts to find where Visual Studio - or other products in the Visual Studio family - is located. For example, if you know the relative path to MSBuild, you can find the root of the Visual Studio install and combine the paths to find what you need.

You can emit different formats for information based on what your scripts can consume, including plain text, JSON, and XML. Pull requests may be accepted for other common formats as well.

vswhere is included with the installer as of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.2 and later, and can be found at the following location: %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vswhere.exe. The binary may be executed from that location as needed, installed using popular package managers including WinGet, or the latest version may be downloaded from the releases page.

This is a link in the README.md file to examples located in the wiki at Examples.

I can start up the Git Bash shell in a folder using a right mouse click and selecting "Git Bash Here". Next I paste in the following command line (double quotes are needed due to spaces in the pathname):

"C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/Installer/vswhere.exe"

This command will generate a list of various properties in a keyword value type of list for each of the installed versions of Visual Studio. In my case that would be two versions: Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019.

There are command options for vswhere that are displayed with the "-help" command line option.

$ "C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/Installer/vswhere.exe" -help
Visual Studio Locator version 3.1.1+f4ef329670 [query version 3.7.2182.35401]
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Usage:  [options]

Options:
  -all           Finds instances in complete, launchable, and incomplete states. By default, only instances
                 in a complete state - no errors or reboot required - are searched.
  -prerelease    Also searches prereleases. By default, only releases are searched.
  -products arg  One or more product IDs to find. Defaults to Community, Professional, and Enterprise.
                 Specify "*" by itself to search all product instances installed.
                 See https://aka.ms/vs/workloads for a list of product IDs.
  -requires arg  One or more workload or component IDs required when finding instances.
                 All specified IDs must be installed unless -requiresAny is specified.
                 You can specify wildcards including "?" to match any one character,
                 or "*" to match zero or more of any characters.
                 See https://aka.ms/vs/workloads for a list of workload and component IDs.
  -requiresAny   Find instances with any one or more workload or components IDs passed to -requires.
  -version arg   A version range for instances to find. Example: [15.0,16.0) will find versions 15.*.
                 See https://aka.ms/vswhere/versions for more information about versions.
  -latest        Return only the newest version and last installed.
  -sort          Sorts the instances from newest version and last installed to oldest.
                 When used with "find", first instances are sorted then files are sorted lexigraphically.
  -legacy        Also searches Visual Studio 2015 and older products. Information is limited.
                 This option cannot be used with either -products or -requires.
  -path          Gets the instance for the current path. Not compatible with any other selection option.
  -format arg    Return information about instances found in a format described below.
  -property arg  The name of a property to return. Defaults to "value" format.
                 Use delimiters ".", "/", or "_" to separate object and property names.
                 Example: "properties.nickname" will return the "nickname" property under "properties".
  -include arg   One or more extra properties to include, as described below.
  -find arg      Returns matching file paths under the installation path. Defaults to "value" format.
                 The following patterns are supported:
                 ?  Matches any one character except "\".
                 *  Matches zero or more characters except "\".
                 ** Searches the current directory and subdirectories for the remaining search pattern.
  -nocolor       Do not print instances formatted with colors. By default, colors suitable for dark-themed
                 terminals (common) are output when printing to a terminal but not to a pipe.
  -nologo        Do not show logo information. Some formats noted below will not show a logo anyway.
  -utf8          Use UTF-8 encoding (recommended for JSON).
  -?, -h, -help  Display this help message.


Extra properties:
  packages       Return an array of packages installed in this instance.
                 Supported only by the "json" and "xml" formats.

Formats:
  json           An array of JSON objects for each instance (no logo).
  text           Colon-delimited properties in separate blocks for each instance (default).
  value          A single property specified by the -property parameter (no logo, no color).
  xml            An XML data set containing instances (no logo).

If I enter:

"C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/Installer/vswhere.exe" -latest -property installationPath

the vswhere utility displays C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community as that is the value of the Property "installationPath" for the Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition instance of the two instances I have installed.

I can use the following Windows CMD script in a file in a source folder to create a command shell window that is initialized for the latest instance of Visual Studio with its current directory the source folder.

echo setting up the Visual Studio compile environment

for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%i in (`"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vswhere" -latest -products * -requires Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64 -property installationPath`) do (
  set InstallDir=%%i
)

%comspec% /k "%InstallDir%\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat"

Madras

Answer 5

From the registry, HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\InstallDir for Visual Studio 2008

Iphagenia

Answer 6

For newer versions of VS it is better to use by Microsoft provided APIs, because install information is no longer maintained in registry correctly.

1. install Nuget package Microsoft.VisualStudio.Setup.Configuration.Interop

2. do the trick (returned is tuple with version and path of all VS instances):

    private const int REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG = unchecked((int)0x80040154);
   
    public static IEnumerable<(string, string)> GetVisualStudioInstallPaths() 
    {
        var result = new List<(string, string)>();
   
        try
        {
            var query = new SetupConfiguration() as ISetupConfiguration2;
            var e = query.EnumAllInstances();
   
            int fetched;
            var instances = new ISetupInstance[1];
   
            do
            {
                e.Next(1, instances, out fetched);
   
                if (fetched > 0)
                {
                    var instance2 = (ISetupInstance2)instances[0];
                    result.Add((instance2.GetInstallationVersion(), instance2.GetInstallationPath()));
                }
            }
            while (fetched > 0);
        }
        catch (COMException ex) when (ex.HResult == REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)
        {
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
        }
   
        return result;
    }
   

Regards

Mamelon

Answer 7

Is this for an add-in of some sort for Visual Studio?

Because otherwise, you need to be aware that someone running your program may not actually have Visual Studio installed.

If it is installed, you can generally find it at a known location in the registry, such as HKCR/Applications/devenv.exe/shell/edit/command for VS2008.

Filmdom