Cloning Your VS 2017 Packages

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.

So, you've just installed VS 2017. Now you want to "copy" that setup and share what you installed with your coworkers, say you're trying to create a standard work or class setup...

How do you capture what you installed? You're sure there's some kind of command line switch or something, some way to export your currently installed VS 2017 setup/package/workload?

Nope.

There is a cool new VS 2017 Setup API, Setup Configuration, though, with code samples and everything. Maybe that can be used?

Yep!

Today's quick and dirty project from Tim Sneath uses the Setup Configuration API to capture and export your currently installed packages, generating the command line parameters that you can use to install a like looking VS setup on another PC.

timsneath/vs-clone

Clones a Visual Studio 2017 installation so it can be reproduced on another machine. Run this on a machine that already has Visual Studio 2017 installed, and it will interrogate the instance of Visual Studio to identify what workloads and components were selected, and attempt to create a command line that recreates the same installation.

Syntax:

clonevs.exe 

Limitations

  • Very limited testing done so far
  • Doesn't identify language packs installed
  • Assumes only one VS2017 instance on the machine
  • While it recognizes component groups, it also identifies individual components that are part of the component group as if they've been individually selected.
  • Code isn't very pretty yet

...

image

... [Click through for the repo]