A New Installation Experience

Microsoft Visual Studio has always been an extremely powerful development environment. One of the reasons for its power is that it can target multiple development platforms and, with versions 2013 and 2015, it even added the option to target non-Microsoft technologies and operating systems. For example, think of Android and iOS development with both Xamarin and Apache Cordova. But great power also means a complex infrastructure, and in the past Visual Studio required many hours for installation and a huge amount of space on disk. In Visual Studio 2017, Microsoft brings a new installation experience that simplifies the process and saves both time and disk space. Installing Visual Studio 2017 will be your first experience with the new version, and it deserves a thorough discussion.

Solving the complexity of the Visual Studio installation

Keeping in mind the importance of the overall performance and efficiency of its premiere development tool, one of Microsoft’s goals for Visual Studio 2017 was to simplify the installation process to save developers time and disk space. With Visual Studio 2015, a full installation required many gigabytes on disk and several hours to complete. Solving this problem meant rethinking the entire IDE infrastructure and changing both the way Visual Studio consumes the components it relies on and the way it allows targeting different development platforms. Based on these changes, Visual Studio 2017 is now made of a core shell that includes the code editor and essential tools, referred to as Visual Studio core editor. This provides capabilities for writing code in a number of languages, including (but not limited to) Visual Basic, C#, C++, and Python, along with syntax colorization, IntelliSense, and debugging support, all in the familiar Visual Studio environment (see Chapter 5, "Working with solutions, folders, and languages").

Additionally, Visual Studio 2017 supports adding sets of components, each targeting a specific development scenario. Each set of components is referred to as a workload. Workloads make installation and maintenance easier and allow developers to install what they actually need without unnecessary components, SDKs, and tools. You could even decide to install only the Visual Studio core editor without any additional workloads in order to get the basic coding environment, which would reduce the space required by the Visual Studio installation to about 750 megabytes. You will probably need more than just syntax highlighting, which means you will want to select the proper workloads—this just gives you an idea of how Visual Studio’s infrastructure has been revisited. The next section will describe how to install Visual Studio 2017 and explain more about workloads and what you can do with each.

Installing Visual Studio 2017

Tip: Visual Studio 2017 can be installed side-by-side on a machine that has earlier versions of the IDE installed.

When you start the setup program, you are prompted with a completely new user interface that presents a list of workloads. This is represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Starting the Installation of Visual Studio 2017

As you can see, workloads are grouped by the following categories:

• Windows
• Web & Cloud
• Mobile & Gaming
• Other Toolsets

All the available workloads can be discovered by scrolling through the list (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Additional Workloads

You can select all the workloads you’ll need for your daily work with Visual Studio 2017. If you select no workloads, only the Visual Studio core editor will be installed. On the right side of the dialog, you can expand the workload name and see which components it includes and a list of additional, individual components. Table 1 depicts available workloads in more detail.

Table 1: Available Workloads for Visual Studio 2017

For the instructional purposes of this e-book, I have installed all the available workloads. You are not required to do the same—feel free to select only those you need. You can later install additional workloads as required.

Customizing the installation with individual components

Although workloads help keep the installation simple, you might still need to install individual components. In Figure 2, you will see an item called Individual components. Click it to access the full list of individual components that can be installed regardless of selected workloads (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Selecting Individual Components

As an example, the GitHub extension for Visual Studio 2017 is not selected by default, which means you might want to select this component if you plan to work with Git repositories on that popular service. Once you have made your selection, click Close and select the edition of Visual Studio 2017 you want to install. A dialog will show the progress of the operation (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Installation Progress

The time needed for complete installation depends on the number of workloads and on your Internet connection. But even with many workloads selected, you will notice it goes much faster than previous Visual Studio installations.

Installing multiple editions

With Visual Studio 2017, you can finally install multiple editions on the same machine. This great feature means you can install the Community, Professional, and Enterprise editions on the same machine (or any two of them). This is now possible because each edition is installed into a specific subfolder on the system. Apart from running separate installers, you could launch a new installation directly from the current setup program. Figure 4 shows an Install button for both the Community and Professional editions while Enterprise is being installed.

Note: Visual Studio core assemblies are no longer installed to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). In order to support the installation of multiple editions, most assemblies required by Visual Studio 2017 now reside in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\%editionName%\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies, where %editionName% is the installed edition (such as Community, Professional, or Enterprise).

Modifying the Visual Studio 2017 installation

Visual Studio 2017 offers a new shortcut for modifying an existing installation. You simply go to the Windows > All Programs menu and select the Visual Studio Installer shortcut. This will start the setup program, and you will have an option to add or remove workloads or individual components.

Launching Visual Studio 2017

As with its predecessor, Visual Studio 2017 launches using the same-named shortcut in the All Programs menu. When it starts for the first time, Visual Studio will ask for your Microsoft account credentials to log in (optional). As you might know, entering a Microsoft account will allow for synchronizing settings across machines. This will also automatically restore customized settings you might have on an existing VS 2017 installation. When launching Visual Studio, you will immediately recognize better performance and faster startup than Visual Studio 2015. Other new features at startup are described in the next chapter.

Chapter summary

Visual Studio 2017 introduces a completely new installation experience based on the Visual Studio core editor and a number of workloads, each targeting specific development scenarios. This not only simplifies the setup process, but installing Visual Studio is now much faster and more efficient. You still maintain full control of the installed components, and you can even install multiple editions of Visual Studio 2017 on the same machine. Now that you have set up the environment, you will find some new features when launching Visual Studio 2017 for the first time.