Visual Studio 2017 Installation Using Offline Installer

Recently, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2017 on the 20^th Anniversary of Visual Studio IDE. It launched on Wednesday, March 7, 2017. Visual Studio 2017 is the most awaited software from Microsoft. The first version of Visual Studio IDE was released on March 19, 1997, which was Visual Studio 97. At that point of time, C# didn't exist and Visual Basic, Visual C++ etc. languages were part of this great tool.

We can download Visual Studio 2017 from the Visual Studio official site. Compared to earlier versions, it has three different versions and these are Community, Professional and Enterprise. If we do not have Microsoft subscriptions for Visual Studio, then we can go with Visual Studio Community Version, which is free and most of the features are covered. We can install it and start coding right away.

It also includes .NET Core features and cross platform development but this is on'y if we have installed all the required packages. Even we do not have license for Visual Studio 2017 Community, we can start the development, using this with the limited features.

However, if we require all the features of Visual Studio 2017, then we need to purchase and download it from Visual Studio site. We can also just compare the features among all these three different products of Visual Studio. Free trial is also available for these two products (Professional and Enterprise).

Before installation, we must consider our hardware and prerequisites. As per the Visual Studio official Website, the prerequisites given below should be fulfilled. 




Once we feel the required prerequisites are available, we can start the installation.

Create Offline Installer

Visual Studio 2015 or previous versions of Visual Studio come with the installation packages, where the whole package is downloaded when we download any of these versions. Nevertheless, this time Visual Studio is one step ahead and makes our installation very easy. Sometimes, we do not need the whole installation package, we only want to download those packages, which are required for our development, which is a custom installation package.

Thus, when we download Visual Studio 2017, it only provides vs_enterprise.exe (every versions has different name). When we run this EXE file, then it will ask us to choose the installation packages and based on our selection, it will download all these packages online and install them.

Even if we can install it online, sometimes we need Offline Installer. We can make Offline Installer use downloaded EXE file to follow these steps. First, open command prompt and type the command given below.

vs_enterprise.exe --layout "C:\Visual Studio 2017" --lang en-US

We can change our download location in place of “C:\Visual Studio 2017” and make changes in the language. When we press enter, it will take a few minutes to start downloading packages, so be patient and it will start downloading, as shown below.

After downloading completes, we will find the Offline Installer with whole packages in the provided location, as shown below.

Installation

Go to that location, where we have downloaded Visual Studio 2017 and run the setup (for my case, it is vs_enterprise.exe).

1. vs_enterprise.exe for Visual Studio Enterprise.
2. vs_professional.exe for Visual Studio Professional.
3. vs_community.exe for Visual Studio Community. 

It will start the installation in a few moments and shows the first screen, as shown below.

Now, it will show the Products Window, where all the available products will be shown. We can see the image given below, where all the listed products show Visual Studio IDE. We can install any of them but if we do not have the license or subscription, then it's preferable  to move on with Visual Studio Community 2017.

In our case, we have installed  the Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio 2017. The first screen will show where we can select the required components for the installation, which can be our .NET Desktop Development, ASP.NET and Web Development, Azure Development, Node.js development etc. We just need to select those components, which we want to install.

If we are interested in installing the packages individually, then go to the Individual Components tab, choose the required individual components and click to install the button at the bottom. It will start the installation of Visual Studio 2017 with the selected components.

After installation, we can also modify our components. It means that we can also install further components or uninstall installed components. It is all up to us. If we have forgot something to install, just click on the modify button as shown below and add/remove the components.

If you wish to complete the installation process, just click Launch button. It will proceed with a sign in process to validate our license of Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise version.

After clicking Launch button, it will ask for sign in with Visual Studio account to verify your license. Once you will finish the sign in process with the valid credentials, then it will redirect to the first screen of Visual Studio 2017.

At last, it will show first screen of Visual Studio 2017. 

Conclusion

Therefore, today we have seen how to install Visual Studio 2017 with Offline Installer by following simple steps.

I hope this post will help you. Please put your feedback, using comments, which will help me to improve the next post. If you have any doubt, please ask your query in the comment section and if you like this post, please share it with your friends. Thanks.