Examples

vswhere.exe has been designed to be a flexible option to finding Visual Studio and other products like our standalone Build Tools. It can emit information in a variety of output formats to support a wide range of build and deployment tooling, such as batch scripts, make files, and PowerShell scripts - though in the latter case, I recommend you check out VSSetup.PowerShell for a more PowerShell-friendly option with even more capability than vswhere.

The following are merely useful examples for a variety of targeted scenarios. Contributions via pull requests for other common scenarios are welcome.

• Find MSBuild
• Find VC
• Find VSIXInstaller
• Find VSTest
• Start Developer Command Prompt
• Use .vsconfig File

For each of these examples, all versions of Visual Studio or other installed products instance are searched. You can always pass -version [15.0,16.0) to limit your searches to a particular version. In this example, only 15.x versions will be searched. Read about Versions for more ways to specify a version range.

Components

To find an instance or instances that have required workloads or components installed, you can pass any number to -requires. By default, all specified IDs must be installed for an instance to be selected. If you want to select instances with any of those IDs installed, pass -requiresAny.

See https://aka.ms/vs/workloads for a list of workloads and components with descriptions.

Wildcards

New with version 3.1.1 you can also use wildcards:

• ? matches any one character
• * matches zero or more of any characters

For example, if you need to find an instance with any Windows 10 SDK installed, you could call:

vswhere -requires Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows10SDK.*