Visual Studio 2017 & 2019

Content Authoring
1

Curious how you guys push out updates for Visual Studio 2017 and 2019? I’m having difficulty getting this to work. I believe you need to update the installer first before you can update the application. Every month I have 100 machines to update MANUALLY. Life would be sweet if I can get it to work through Bigfix.

Help!

thanks.

Sno.

2

If you’re comfortable letting the machines self-update you can invoke the updater like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe" update --passive --norestart --installpath "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise"

2019 should work the same way but you’d want to test that

3

Anyone have an example with using a local Repository for the downloads?

  • many of my systems can not talk direct to the internet, and rely on Bigfix to download and pass to the server for execution.
4

@mesee2

By default, the BigFix root server fetches the files from the internet and passes them downstream to the relays and then to the clients.

If your BigFix root server cannot talk to the internet, you will want to investigate the AirGap tooling and process for fetching downloads and copying them over.
https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/9.5/platform/Platform/Config/c_airgap_tool_overview_new.html

5

@brolly33 - completely understand the flow. I was just hoping to avoid the leg work in finding all of the packages on the internet and downloading to build my own fixlet.

  • the example provided originally for Visual studio was it basically just enables visual studio to reach out and update itself
6

I do not have an example but the documentation here should be relevant for what you’re trying to do.

1 Like
7

Thanks for the help with this.

8

In general you should make a new post with your question and what you’ve tried so far.

You should just be able to put the word waithidden infront of that command.

waithidden "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe" update --passive --norestart --installpath "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise"

Did that not work?

1 Like
9

I haven’t checked this specifically but I’ve sometimes had issues passing multiple quoted strings to waithidden. We may need to workaround by taking advantage of cmd.exe’s special quote handling

waithidden cmd.exe /c ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe" update --passive --norestart --installpath "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise""
1 Like
10

OK this was all helpful, but in the end I was not able to make BigFix script work at all, so I just used Powershell in Bigfix. Turns out there are several folders to tell the installer to use as the installpath, so I made a fixlet for 2017, 2019, and 2022 with each fixlet having 5 lines so each component got patched. Each line also included -wait in the powershell parms so it waited to complete before continuing to the others, otherwise the first one worked and the others all failed because an update was in progress.

Relevance

((exists file “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe”)) AND ((exists folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise”) OR (exists folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools”) OR (exists folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\TestAgent”)OR (exists folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional”) OR (exists folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community”))

Action Script
Script Type PowerShell

start-process -wait -filepath ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe’ -argumentlist " update --passive --force --norestart --installpath ““C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise””"
start-process -wait -filepath ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe’ -argumentlist " update --passive --force --norestart --installpath ““C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools””"
start-process -wait -filepath ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe’ -argumentlist " update --passive --force --norestart --installpath ““C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\TestAgent””"
start-process -wait -filepath ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe’ -argumentlist " update --passive --force --norestart --installpath ““C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional””"
start-process -wait -filepath ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vs_installer.exe’ -argumentlist " update --passive --force --norestart --installpath ““C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community””"

This one is for 2017, and seems to work, and I made 3 fixlets to patch these 5 components of the 3 versions 2017, 2019 and 2022

3 Likes
11

Note that 2022 was 64 bit so I had to make a new set of fixlets for the above, editing the installpath to the non x86 path