Programmatically finding the VS2017 installation directory

Question

With previous versions of VS you could query the registry to determine the installation directory for VS:

HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Wow6432Node\\Microsoft\\Visu

Answer 1

Well, vswhere.exe doesn't really supply more than the Visual Studio edition installation path. Here's my .profile file Interix snippet from 2008 doing the same with a minor update (shell script):

if [[ -n $PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432 || $PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE != "x86" ]]; then
  hkeybase='HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\'
else
  hkeybase='HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\'
fi
for vsver in "15.0" "14.0" "12.0" "11.0" "10.0" "9.0" "8.0"; do
  _vsinstalldir=$(reg.exe query ${hkeybase}'VisualStudio\SxS\VS7' -v $vsver 2>/dev/null \
   | sed -n 's|.*REG_SZ *\([ [:print:]]*\).*|\1|p' | sed 's|\\|/|g')
if [[ -n $_vsinstalldir ]]; then break; fi
done; unset vsver

That's enumerating Visual Studio installations favouring the latest in registry key

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SxS\VS7

Still working for Visual Studio 2017. Would be easy to translate to cmd syntax. To query the registry is simpler and doesn't require vswhere.exe in your path, thus favourable IMO.

Now finding the current Visual C++ instance and the SDKs is another task entirely. :D

Common output in case you wonder:

C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Enterprise/