Non deterministic error: 0x57 "version" parameter is not supported

[Sam13]

I have two machines, both Windows 7 with VS 2015 installed.
One machine has also VS 2017 installed. I'm using vswhere version 2.1.3

I try to run the following command to get the path for VS2015:
vswhere.exe -legacy -version "[14,15)" -property installationPath -nologo

On the machine with VS2017 installed the path is successfully determined.
On the other machine the following error is reported:
Error 0x57: The "version" parameter is not supported

I already made sure that the same version of vswhere is used...

[heaths]

Already fixed in in #85. Please use version 2.1.3 or newer of vswhere.

[Sam13]

As I wrote in my first post: I'm using version 2.1.3

[heaths]

If you look at the issues mentioned by #85 this behavior was intentional since version ranges are not supported without VS2017 or newer installed. Previously I simply ignored the version range, but then callers may get data that does not fit in the version range if VS2017 or newer - which provides the version range handler - is not installed.

[Sam13]

@heaths Thanks, for the clarification. But I still do not get why VS2017 is needed to locate previous versions of VisualStudio...
What's the command line to find specific versions of VisualStudio without having VS2017 is installed?
E.g. 2010 or 2015

[heaths]

It's not. vswhere can locale Visual Studio 10.0 (2010) and newer, but you cannot use the -version parameter because the function that parses it is actually part of the query API introduced in VS2017. You can use -latest and if, say, 14.0 is newest, that will be selected.

In past versions, passing -version without the query API installed would not error but wouldn't do anything, and there were a couple of complaints that if someone, say, specified -version [12.0,14.0] 10.0 - if installed - could get returned. I agreed an error in this case makes more sense, though I designed vswhere to fail as little as possible (i.e. best effort approaches). Better to err than return incorrect data.

Note that vswhere was designed for 15.0 and newer. Supporting 10.0 - with minimal information returned - was bolted on later so developers could change detection scripts to use vswhere exclusively instead of handling registry- vs. query API-based detection separately themselves.

[jvilimek]

Hi there. I have VS 15.5.4 installed. when I run vswhere with version
& $vsWhere -version 15 -property displayName
then it returns an error:

Visual Studio Locator version 2.2.11+gf1a9c6c78d
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Error 0x57: The "version" parameter is not supported
All/Latest versions return empty set (i.e. nothing but logo)
what can be wrong?

[heaths]

Please open a new issue in the future. This one is old and resolved.

It appears you don't have the query API registered. Please try repairing Visual Studio.