How to create an offline installer of Visual Studio 2017 RC?

During the Connect() developer event, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2017 RC (Release Candidate). The said post contains all the Microsoft server links to download the public build, which is a web installer and you need to connect to internet while installing.

In case you need an offline installer to download once and install in multiple systems, here's the post to generate the offline installer. Continue reading the know more about it.

The 'Visual Studio 2017 RC' build that you generally get from internet is a web installer. If you would like to create an offline installation layout of Visual Studio 2017 so that you can install the product on a computer that doesn't have an internet connection or want to download once and install to multiple devices, here's the steps:

• Download the Visual Studio setup executable file to a drive on your local machine. You can get it from here http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2016/11/visual-studio-2017.html
• Now run the downloaded setup executable with the following arguments (switches) from a command prompt:
  • Add --layout <path>, where <path> is the location where you want the layout to be downloaded. By default, all languages will be downloaded.
  • In case you want to restrict the download to a single language only, you can do so by providing the --lang <language> argument, where <language> is one of the ISO country codes.

For example, to download the 'Visual Studio 2017 RC Enterprise Edition' under the local path "C:\Visual Studio 2017 RC", you need to provide the following command:

vs_enterprise.exe --layout "C:\Visual Studio 2017 RC" --lang en-US            # English Edition

vs_enterprise.exe --layout "C:\Visual Studio 2017 RC" --lang ko-KR            # Korean Edition

To install Visual Studio 2017 on the target machine from an offline installation layout, you first need to navigate to the Certificates folder, which you can find in the Layout folder. Now, right-click and install each certificate in the Certificates folder. If you are prompted for a password after you install a certificate, click Continue. Then run the downloaded setup executable again (in our above case, it is 'vs_enterprise.exe') from the Layout folder and follow the onscreen options.