vswhere.exe not giving the current version of vs_BuildTools installed.

Question

We were exploring regarding installing Visual studio Build tools through python script (for pipeline setup), for the same there are command line options present in the vs_BuildTools.exe , this is great but how does one know the current version of the VS Build tools installed (this is required for accessing the question : is an update required).

There is an option of running vswhere.exe that comes to mind, but running vswhere.exe does not list the version of Build tools installed (We have tried by running it with installing only vs_BuildTools and not Visual studio and it is not giving any info regarding the current install of build tools).

is this is a bug of vswhere.exe or are we trying a wrong approach.

Answer 1

Hi @aman sahay , 

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A! 

Please try the following command to search all installed VS instances:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer>vswhere  -products *

If it doesn’t work, you can use the Visual Studio Setup PowerShell Module to query the VS instances.

More tools to detect the VS instances, please refer to: Tools for detecting and managing Visual Studio instances.

Sincerely,

Anna

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