vswhere-rs

Provides support for invoking and capturing the output of the vswhere utility.

Background

Starting with the 2017 editions, Visual Studio products support side-by-side installation. This means that the Windows registry is no longer sufficient for storing information about installed Visual Studio instances, and a more sophisticated detection method is required. vswhere is an open-source utility from Microsoft that consumes a COM-based query API and generates output in one of several formats (text, JSON, XML). Through this crate, Rust code can pass arguments to, invoke and retrieve output from vswhere in an idiomatic manner.

Requirements

This crate works with vswhere 2.5.2 or newer. Older versions are not supported since they do not accept the -utf8 flag, which forces vswhere to generate UTF-8 encoded output (otherwise vswhere uses the system default encoding). vswhere can be installed in one of three different ways:

• Via Chocolatey (recommended - package page here);
• As part of Visual Studio Installer (vswhere.exe will be located in %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer - note that the bundled version tends to be outdated);
• Manually, by downloading vswhere.exe to the desired location.

Example

extern crate vswhere;

use vswhere::Config;

fn main() {
    println!("{:?}", Config::run_default_path().unwrap());
}

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.