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azure-devopsmsbuildvstest

How to get VS build agent capabilities without installing the full Visual Studio application?

I've installed the latest VS Build Tools (2022), but my on-prem build agent isn't picking up the VisualStudio-related capabilities. I've been under the impression that we no longer need to install the full application in order to get these capabilities.

An example from this blog post:

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I've added all workloads to my offline layout, and I've included them in my installation.

I know this is possible, because earlier I accidentally included Python and VS 2019 Build Tools in my Node.js installation configuration. The VS-related capabilities were found by the agent then.

But I'm trying to get 2022, so I uninstalled 2019.

How can I get the 2022 VS-related capabilities to be installed and detected by my build agent, without installing the full Visual Studio product?

Solution

  • You need to upgrade the agent to a recent enough version. You can download the agent from the azure-pipelines-agent repository's releases page. Or manually specify the capabilities.

    You may need to set a special environment flag on the agent to prevent it from automatically being downgraded to whatever version shipped with your version if Azure DevOps Server or Team Foundation Server.

    And then you'll also need to install the latest version of the vsbuild/msbuild and vstest tasks

    Required agent version

    You will need to install the most recent agent from the azure-pipelines-agent repository for it to auto-detect Visual Studio 2022, or alternatively add the capabilities to the agent manually.

    You may need to force Azure DevOps Server to not downgrade back to its preferred agent version. You can do so by setting the following environment variable at the system level on your server before launching the agent:

     AZP_AGENT_DOWNGRADE_DISABLED=true

    These tricks will work for most tasks in the azure-pipelines-tasks repository, as long as it doesn't depend on a UI extension or service connection type that isn't available in your version of Azure DevOps Server.

    https://jessehouwing.net/adding-visual-studio-2022-to-azure-devops-server-2020/