PowerShell can certainly do it, but I'm too unfamiliar to quote an equivalent example. No idea how far back in legacy-land this might work. This correctly located the install path even in non-default locations. 'select InstallLocation from MSFT_VSInstance' I'm using TCC for my shell (formerly known as '4NT'), and the (built-in) command was as simple as: wmiquery. What did seem to work was WMI queries, if your batch file is being run by a shell that can do WMI queries, that is. 3 Answers Step 1 - Make sure your computer is ready for Visual Studio Step 2 - Download Visual Studio Step 3 - Install the Visual Studio installer Step 4. So I was left still wanting a batch file that would automatically locate the compilers/linkers/etc. No particular environment variables were magically set, the tools can be installed in places other than C:, etc. vswhere.exe didn't believe anything was installed. I only installed Visual Studio 'Build Tools', and I didn't find a solution here that worked. For the small minority just using Microsoft's free command-line compiler (which still is kinda under the umbrella of things called 'Visual Studio'), I leave this note.

Visual studio install location