The latest release of vswhere not outputs additional properties as requested, along with catalog properties and a way to disambiguate nested properties – not that there are any currently. You can specify the nested properties followed by a property name like “properties/nickname”. Delimiters supported are “_”, “/”, and “.” to fit with the text, JSON, and XML formats. You can use any delimiter with any format, however.
The default output for an instance now looks like:
[
{
"instanceId": "890353f3",
"installDate": "2017-09-16T01:24:28Z",
"installationName": "VisualStudio/15.4.0+27004.2002",
"installationPath": "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise",
"installationVersion": "15.4.27004.2002",
"productId": "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Product.Enterprise",
"productPath": "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe",
"isPrerelease": false,
"displayName": "Visual Studio Enterprise 2017",
"description": "Microsoft DevOps solution for productivity and coordination across teams of any size",
"channelId": "VisualStudio.15.Release",
"channelPath": "C:\Users\heaths\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Packages\_Channels\4CB340F5\catalog.json",
"channelUri": "https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/channel",
"enginePath": "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\resources\app\ServiceHub\Services\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Setup.Service",
"releaseNotes": "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=660692#15.4.0",
"thirdPartyNotices": "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=660708",
"catalog": {
"buildBranch": "d15svc",
"buildVersion": "15.4.27004.2002",
"id": "VisualStudio/15.4.0+27004.2002",
"localBuild": "build-lab",
"manifestName": "VisualStudio",
"manifestType": "installer",
"productDisplayVersion": "15.4.0",
"productLine": "Dev15",
"productLineVersion": "2017",
"productMilestone": "RTW",
"productMilestoneIsPreRelease": "False",
"productName": "Visual Studio",
"productPatchVersion": "0",
"productPreReleaseMilestoneSuffix": "6.0",
"productRelease": "RTW",
"productSemanticVersion": "15.4.0+27004.2002"
},
"properties": {
"campaignId": "844478574.1505524861",
"channelManifestId": "VisualStudio.15.Release/15.4.0+27004.2002",
"nickname": "",
"setupEngineFilePath": "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installershell.exe"
}
}
]
Most of the properties are provided through the ISetupPropertyStore. This interface is implemented by ISetupInstance objects, and provided by ISetupInstance2::GetProperties for custom properties. Starting with Visual Studio 2017 Update 3, you can also get catalog properties by calling IUnknown::QueryInterface on an ISetupInstance object for ISetupInstanceCatalog, which also provides an ISetupPropertyStore from ISetupInstanceCatalog::GetProperties. As we add new features that require persisting properties, they will automatically be exposed.