Visual Studio 2019 Network Installs

Here’s just a very quick guide for creating a Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 network/package install

The first thing you need to do is to download the install bootstrapper that you want (Enterprise or Professional):

Visual Studio Community	vs_community.exe
Visual Studio Professional	vs_professional.exe
Visual Studio Enterprise	vs_enterprise.exe

You’ll notice that if you don’t use any parameters you’ll download a complete source of Visual Studio 2019. This means at least 35GB of source files, and I doubt you need that, so, to download exactly what you need and get a much lighter install source, follow these steps:

1. You can download only the components you need and the language you need
   
   
2. To determine the components and language IDs (this may vary between SKUs) visit this webpages:
   Workload or Components IDs
   Language IDs
   
   
3. Now that you have all you need, just run the command-line below. In this example I’m creating an offline installer for Visual Studio 2019 Enterprise that includes:
   
   - Visual Studio Core Files
   - Managed Desktop components (for C# developing for example)
   - Recommend components (a Microsoft recommended files based on components id)
   
   Command-line
   vs_enterprise__2022417084.1542710334.exe --layout C:\Temp\MSVisualStudioEnterprise2019 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --includeRecommended --lang en-US
   
   
4. Now that you have all files, just run the following command line for silent install:
   vs_setup.exe --quiet --wait --nocache --noweb --norestart
   
   
   

How to Create a Visual Studio Community Offline Install

Following other Microsoft products, Visual Studio Community it’s all about downloading just what you need to use.
Although this is great for end users, not so good if you’re a sysadmin that need to create installation packages.

So, today for Microsoft Visual Studio Community, here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. First of all download the setup wrapper here:
   https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/express/
   
   
2. And…now comes the tricky part. You can download only what you need to install, and it’s all based in “layouts”. The main command it’s this one:
   vs_Community.exe --lang en-us --layout f:\vs2017c –all

The above command will download ALL the “layouts”, but you may want do download only the necessary files to install for .NET development. So you should take a look at the link below to select just want you want to download/install:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/workload-component-id-vs-community?view=vs-2017#net-desktop-development

How to create a package with Wireshark and WinPcap

As some of you may know, unfortunately isn’t possible to install Wireshark silently with WinPcap.
Well, at least, isn’t possible to do it, just using the Wireshark package alone, although you can install it if you’re running the “normal” user interface.

If you need to create a package to install Wireshark and WinPcap, follow these steps:

1. Download the latest version of Wireshark here
2. Now, you need to download Nmap (zip format) that includes WinPcap
• Don’t know if it will include WinPcap in all versions so, here’s the direct link for 7.12 version
  https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.12-win32.zip
3. So, now that you have both Wireshark and WinPcap, you just need to create a package with your favorite packaging software to install both.

Just a little more info.

To install Wireshark silently:

• /S runs the installer or uninstaller silently with default values. The silent installer will not install WinPCap.
• /desktopicon installation of the desktop icon, =yes - force installation, =no - don’t install, otherwise use default settings. This option can be useful for a silent installer.
• /quicklaunchicon installation of the quick launch icon, =yes - force installation, =no - don’t install, otherwise use default settings.
• /D sets the default installation directory ($INSTDIR), overriding InstallDir and InstallDirRegKey. It must be the last parameter used in the command line and must not contain any quotes even if the path contains spaces.
• /NCRC disables the CRC check. We recommend against using this flag.

To install WinPcap silently:

• /S runs the installer in silent mode

And…that’s it!

Lenovo Drivers Packages Unpack Switches

Here’s a quick tip for unpacking Lenovo drivers:

<packagename>.exe /VERYSILENT /DIR=<packagepath> /Extract=”YES”

Example:
n20ku12w_x64.exe /VERYSILENT /DIR=”D:\Temp\LenovoDriver” /Extract=”YES”