vsinstaller – Offline Visual Studio layout fails silently when running vs_Enterprise.exe


I’m trying to create a Visual Studio “layout” so that I can install Visual Studio in an offline development environment, I tried following the instructions from this page.

However, I’m getting a silent failure from vs_Enterprise.exe with no error popups, no stderr/stdout nothing in Event Viewer, no log files in C:\Temp. I couldn’t find a verbose logging mode for the installer either.

Here is the command I used to create the layout from an online machine:

vs_enterprise.exe --layout E:\my_layout --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.NetWeb --lang en-US

Since I do mostly C# development, I figured that these workloads would be sufficient, but I tried it with a full layout and it’s the same story.

Here are some of the commands I tried on the machine I want to install Visual Studio on:

vs_Enterprise.exe --noWeb --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.NetWeb 

vs_Enterprise.exe --noWeb --noUpdateInstaller --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.ManagedDesktop

vs_Enterprise.exe --noWeb --path cache=D:\my_layout --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workloads.NetWeb 

I’ve run vs_Enterprise.exe --verify which also silently fails with no explanation or feedback.

I’ve created 3 separate layouts that all do this so I can rule out any corruption from the file transfer process.

I’ve confirmed that all the certificates in the “certificates” folder are installed.

Installation machine: Windows 11 Enterprise 64bit 24h2
Visual Studio ChannelID: VisualStudio.17.Release

This one has me stumped y’all.
I wish I had some sort of error message or something to go off, but vs_Enterprise.exe isn’t giving me much to work with.

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