MSVC Standalone

Create a portable Visual Studio distribution from your current installation.

Why?

Installing Visual Studio takes time, requires explicit user interaction and is very hard to automate. By bundling the compiler with your source, you can remove the need of requiring stateful installations of software on computers you wish to build. This process is often called "vendorization".

It can be useful for many cases, one major of them being CI. Your CI sytem now doesn't require any special treatment, since your build can run on any clean Windows installation.

Another case is in development of big systems, for example game engines. If all you need for building your engine is inside your repository, creating reproducible builds becomes a lot easier. You want to upgrade your toolchain from VS 2015 to 2017? No problem, your whole studio does not have to reinstall everything on their computers, it's only required to update the binaries in your repository.

What?

The vs2017.bat script will find your Visual Studio 2017 installation and copy all the required files to use just the compiler and libraries to the first argument specified. This folder can now be used and included wherever you like.

Usage

Simply open a shell (cmd.exe) and execute the vs2017.bat script.

It takes a single argument, which is the target directory where to create the portable distribution.

$ .\vs2017.bat portableVS

Configuration

Currently the distribution excludes all HostX86 files, since there is a clear advantage of using the x64 compiler as opposed to the x86, if you still would like to use it, you can go into the vs2017.bat script and uncomment the section creating the x86 distribution.

TODO

• Add VS2015 script
• Add tests

Contribution

All contributions welcome!

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2017 Arvid Gerstmann