How to Install Visual Basic 2017 Offline

This page offers a way to avoid the long and error-prone online installation of Visual Studio which is a massive package. Our interest is limited to Visual Basic and ASP.Net. One can, later, add other tools such as C# and C++. In this page, "VS" refers to Visual Studio.

Installing Visual Basic 2017 Offline is not a simple process because Visual Basic 2017 is a part of Visual Studio 2017 that comes as one huge package (up to 35GB) in three versions:

• Community Edition (Free)
• Professional Edition (intended for a few people)
• Enterprise (intended for larger software teams)

 Visual Studio by default uses a web-based install process that starts by downloading one of three the bootstrapper package from the VS download page.

When you run the bootstraper, it will initiate download of the Visual Studio components that may be up to 35GB in size and takes a very long time to complete. The purpose of this page is to explain how to avoid the headache of this long and tedious process that can easily fail if you have a slow/unstable Internet link. Despite the effort to avoid large downloads, expect this "shortcut" to generate several hundred Megabytes of downloads. The following process is recommended to install the community edition of Visual Basic:

1. Visit the download page and download the bootstrapper for the community edition.
2. Create a folder such as c:\VB2017 where you will store the uninstalled packages.
3. Copy the bootstratpper to this location.
4. Open the  Windows command prompt or Powershell in this folder [ see image below] 
5.  To open the command prompt or Powershell in a folder, navigate to that folder then press Shift and right-click the mouse. You will see a popup menu similar to the one displayed above. Older versions of Windows allow you to open the Command Prompt. Newer ones (recent Windows 10 versions, open the Powershell). Both operate in a similar way.
6. You need to issue the following commands to launch the bootstrapper in command-line mode to download the required VS package:

 .\vs_community.exe --layout c:\vs2017layout --add  Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --add  Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb  --lang en-US

This command will:

1.  Run the community bootstrapper
2. Create an installation cache in a folder named c:\vs2017layout
3. Add files to install two components of VS which include .Net desktop development and ASP.Net web application development tools.
4. Use the deafault language en-US (US English).

Note the ".\" at the beginning of the command. Linux/Unix people understand this to mean "current folder". Without this part of the command Powershell will not execute the bootstrapper. 

The following will happen:

It says "give us a minute" but may take a long time to execute because this is the part where files are downloaded. The download monitor shows very little activity which implies that the down is not happening...

The active download windows looks like the following:

A total of 1.81GB of installation packages were downloaded which is considerably less than 35GB for the full VS2017 package.

After the download is over, we now issue the install command. 

Install Commands

 An example of an install command looks like the following:

vs_enterprise.exe --installPath C:\desktopVS ^
 --addProductLang fr-FR ^
 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop ^
 --includeRecommended --quiet --wait

It indicates the version (Enterprise edition), the installation directory if different from default, the language/locale, the components (called "Workloads" in VS lingo) and other modifiers. For our case, the edition is community, language is en-US. We can formulate our installation command in the following way:

 .\vs_community.exe  --add  Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --add  Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb   --passive, -p

 We get the following output:

 

 In this case, we have chosen "quiet" installation which means user input is no longer required. The installation proceeds with or without a user interface to completion but never asks the user for input.

Removing "  --passive, -p" gives you better control over the installation because the installer may offer you the opportunity to choose the components you want installed.