I just got back from Kenya and South Africa and had a great time speaking at NexTech Africa and the Microsoft Tech Summit in Johannesburg. I also got to hang out with my wife's family a bunch. While I was there I was reminded (as one is when one travels) how spoiled many of us with being always connected. Depending on how far out of town you get the quality of internet varies. There's not just bandwidth issues but also issues of latency and reliability.

Visual Studio generally - and Visual Studio 2017 specifically - has an online installer and if you lose connectivity during the installation you can run into problems. However, they haven't got an ISO available for downloading for legal reasons. They can't package up the Android Installer from Google, for example, into an ISO. The user needs to download certain things themselves dynamically.

Fortunately there's docs that walk you through making an offline installer. These could be used to create USB sticks or DVDs that could then be passed out at User Groups or free Events.

First, I went to http://visualstudio.com/free and clicked Download. I use VS Community but you can also do this for Enterprise, etc. I downloaded the bootstrapper .exe and put it in its own folder.

If you want EVERYTHING possible then you'd run something like this. Note that is my folder there and I selected en-US as my language.

vs_community.exe --layout e:\vs2017offline --lang en-US

However if you don't want EVERYTHING - maybe you just want .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and Azure, then you'll pass those options in on the command line. They call them "Workloads" but that's a Microsoftism. Here is a list of all the Component IDs you can choose from. I did this to get an offline setup for my main four "workloads." I ran this from a cmd prompt.

vs_community.exe --layout e:\vs2017offline --lang en-US --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.Azure Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetCoreTools Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb



It will go and download everything you need. If you want everything then it'll take a while, so hang back.

If you have trouble or nothing happens, check the dd_bootstrapper*.log file in %TEMP%.