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Overview

This repository contains the VisualStudioShell PowerShell module.

This module uses several components available with Visual Studio 2015 and later to provide the easiest way to start a Developer Command Prompt or a Visual Studio instance.

A single command is enough to start a Developer Command Prompt or Visual Studio for the latest version of Visual Studio installed:

# Start a Developer Command Prompt for the latest (preview) version installed
vshell
# Start the latest (preview) version of the IDE installed
vs

These are aliases for the Enter-VisualStudioShell and Start-VisualStudio functions, respectively.

Optional arguments to these commands as well as additional commands are available to customize the default behavior.

Installation

The module is available from the PowerShell Gallery.

Install-Module VisualStudioShell

Or as usual it can be downloaded wholesale and manually installed. See the documentation on the PowerShell Gallery.

How To

The commands and their parameters are (mostly) well-documented through the PowerShell help system.

Use the following commands to get help.

Get-Command -Module VisualStudioShell
Get-Help vshell
Get-Help vshell -Detailed

etc.

To see information about the actions performed, pick and choose between (combinations of) the -WhatIf, -Verbose and/or -Debug arguments.

To prevent interactive prompts — mainly to install the VSSetup module, use the -Force argument.

How it works

The module just fuses together the functionality of the VSSetup module provided by Microsoft and the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell module included with installations of Visual Studio.

  • The VSSetup module is an alternative for the vswhere program and provides richer information in a way more suitable to PowerShell consumers to locate installed versions of Visual Studio.

  • The Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell exposes the Enter-VsDevCmd command. It is a bit of hack around VsDevCmd.bat which is still the means of initializing Developer Command Prompt. Basically it just runs VsDevCmd.bat in a new process, captures its environment by running set and then just sets every single environment variable in the PowerShell session — even those that weren't changed.

Especially the latter of these is a bit hard to use.

  • It cannot be loaded automatically but must be sourced from the Visual Studio installation directory. This means that the Enter-VsDevCmd command is practically useless - it is not available without doing more work than just starting VsDevCmd yourself.
  • It accepts an opaque string for the arguments it passes to VsDevCmd.bat hence PowerShell is unable to help building the string and, worse, there is not one clue anywhere about what the string may look like.

This module provides argument completion for the valid arguments and in addition allows any additional arguments to pass through to Enter-VsDevCmd.

The details

To see everything the script does or can do, find the sources on GitHub:

$VisualStudio = Get-VisualStudio
vs "$($VisualStudio.InstallationPath)\Common7\Tools"
#or
code "$($VisualStudio.InstallationPath)\Common7\Tools"

Dependencies

Two dependencies are used by this module.

  • VSSetup available from the PowerShell Gallery. The minimum required version is (declared as) 2.2.16 although older versions might work.
  • Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell is part of (recent) Visual Studio installations.

The first is automatically installed if it is not already upon running vshell. The default behavior is to prompt for confirmation to install the module using the Install-Package command. However there is a -Force switch with which this behavior can be overridden.

The second is loaded at most once per PowerShell session from the Visual Studio installation that a Developer Command Prompt is first requested for.

By default this module is loaded from one of these locations:

  • $($VisualStudio.InstallationPath)\Common7\Tools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll
  • $($VisualStudio.InstallationPath)\Common7\Tools\vsdevshell\Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll