Visual Studio 2017 - New Installation Experience

The all new 'Visual Studio 2017' IDE, which was released as 'RC (Release Candidate) bits' during the Microsoft's Connect() event, introduces a new installation experience. If you have already installed the bits, you might have experienced that.

As it is currently in RC build, let me describe the new installation experience here to help others to know about it before they finally start using it.

Do you know that, Visual Studio 2017 is out as a RC build? If not, checkout this post: 'Visual Studio 2017 RC is now available for download' to download the web installers. You can also download the web installer and layout it to download the whole package for offline installation.

You may also want to read 'How to create an offline installer of Visual Studio 2017 RC?' Once you have the installer (either web or offline version), the new installation experience will be same in both the cases. Only thing is, if you have the offline version (as mentioned in the above blog post), the installation will be much more faster.

Once you start the installation process, you will be greeted with the following screen. Click 'Continue' to proceed to the next screen where the IDE installer will start processing the initializing the installer.

Next, a big dialog window will popup in the screen providing you an option to select the workloads that you would like to install. If you don't chose anything here, the IDE installation will be very minimal and you will have only basic coding experience there.

Based on your need, select the optimal workload templates. If you are willing to build applications targeting ASP.NET or HTML, you need to chose 'Web development'. For UWP app development, it is 'Universal Windows Platform development'. Scroll the window to find more workloads like Python, Node.js etc. The details of the selection will be listed at the right side of the window.

If you are an advanced user, you can either select workloads and then navigate to 'Individual components' section or directly jump to the 'Individual components' to have a choice of specific components the you really like to install. I would recommend to do the changes here only after you select the individual workloads. It will make your life easy.

While removing any components, watch for the warnings that the installer triggers. If there is any dependencies, it will notify you accordingly.

The next tab is to select any additional languages that you would like to install. By default, it will select the system's locale but you can modify it. Currently there exists an issue which will prevent you to install multiple languages.

Once done with all of your selections, click 'Install' to proceed with the actual installation. The big window will show you the current progress.

This will be very fast and take very less time than the previous IDE installers. Once the installation completes, the installer will ask you to reboot the system (in case require). Click 'Restart' to reboot your system for the configuration changes to take effect.

From the same page, you will be allowed to modify the existing installation, launch the Visual Studio 2017 IDE or uninstall the complete installation.

How much did you like the new installation experience of Visual Studio 2017 RC? Please let us know in the below comments section. Also, share your feedback/suggestion to Microsoft as this will help them to tune it further before the final release. Stay tuned to this space to read more posts on the new IDE.