Microsoft has recently released vswhere.exe version 2.0.2. Also known as Visual Studio Locator, this version stops the showing up of prereleases in the serch results unless the – prerelease flag is passed. The application works best when used with VS 2017 version 15.3 .
The company has released this version on nuget.org, chocolatey.org, and its GitHub release page. Microsoft’s Heath Stewart exclaims that the vswhere.exe 2.0.2 is released to provide the ability to filter out the Previews released via recently announced Visual Studio Preview channel.
“This will only work when using the query API version 1.11.2290 or newer, however, which is included in the logo for vswhere.exe when executed (starting with version 1.0.62). This new query API will be released in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3.
The output of vswhere.exe when using the new query API will also include a boolean property IsPrerelease. This is also true of the VSSetup PowerShell cmdlets, which also added a -Prerelease switch parameter to the Get-VSSetupInstance cmdlet. The PowerShell cmdlets also include information about the catalog that was last used to install or update the instance, including the semver productSemanticVersion which supports the IsPrelease property.”
Well, it is expected that this behavioural change will not affect majority of developers but will bring developers and Microsoft partners the ability to select the desired Preview releases.