How can I use PowerShell with the Visual Studio Command Prompt?

Question

I've been using Beta 2 for a while now and it's been driving me nuts that I have to punt to cmd.exe when running the Visual?Studio?2010 Command Prompt. I used to have a nice vsvars2008.ps1 script for Visual Studio 2008. Is there a vsvars2010.ps1 script or something similar?

Answer 1

Stealing liberally from blog post Replace Visual Studio Command Prompt with PowerShell, I was able to get this to work. I added the following to my profile.ps1 file and all is well with the world.

pushd 'c:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0VC'
cmd /c "vcvarsall.bat&set" |
foreach {
  if ($_ -match "=") {
    $v = $_.split("="); set-item -force -path "ENV:$($v[0])"  -value "$($v[1])"
  }
}
popd
write-host "`nVisual Studio 2010 Command Prompt variables set." -ForegroundColor Yellow

This has worked well for years - until Visual Studio 2015. vcvarsall.bat no longer exists. Instead, you can use the vsvars32.bat file, which is located in the Common7Tools folder.

pushd 'C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0Common7Tools'    
cmd /c "vsvars32.bat&set" |
foreach {
  if ($_ -match "=") {
    $v = $_.split("="); set-item -force -path "ENV:$($v[0])"  -value "$($v[1])"
  }
}
popd
write-host "`nVisual Studio 2015 Command Prompt variables set." -ForegroundColor Yellow

Things have changed yet again for Visual Studio 2017. vsvars32.bat appears to have been dropped in favor of VsDevCmd.bat. The exact path may vary depending on which edition of Visual Studio 2017 you're using.

pushd "C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio2017EnterpriseCommon7Tools"
cmd /c "VsDevCmd.bat&set" |
foreach {
  if ($_ -match "=") {
    $v = $_.split("="); set-item -force -path "ENV:$($v[0])"  -value "$($v[1])"
  }
}
popd
Write-Host "`nVisual Studio 2017 Command Prompt variables set." -ForegroundColor Yellow

You can also make the split create just two items to avoid breaking values including the equal sign, which is also the separator of the environment variable name and the value:

$v = $_.split("=", 2); set-item -force -path "ENV:$($v[0])"  -value