Improve VS2017 detection by leveraging VSWhere.exe about terminal HOT 9 CLOSED

Happy to get a PR in for this @zadjii-msft , would the preferred approach be to require choco install vswhere, just require a version of vswhere be on the PATH before running razzle or something else?

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I have VS2019 and VS2019 Preview installed through the installer and the included VSWhere was not added to my path by default. I can try to locate vswhere to then locate msbuild, or just require it be on the path somehow for it to run.

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We don't add it to the PATH because it's not an oft-enough used tool. Every directoryt added to PATH merely increases lookup time.

I recommend you acquire vswhere.exe via nuget or chocolatey, as described here. You can use the version we always install to "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vswhere.exe" but you're rolling the dice on what features you get. For example, I just resolved a bug against vswhere because someone was using that path and trying to use the -find parameter that was added later. The only way to be sure you get the features you want is either use the ones we added initially (but that started in 15.2) or acquire it yourself. You can also redist it, which is what build systems like Azure Pipelines do (it's used by various built-in tasks).

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Thanks, I just got a version of razzle.cmd working with the chocolatey version and the -find parameter actually. It seems a bit heavy handed to put a choco install vswhere in razzle.cmd, but that would ensure it's a one step setup process. I'll post a PR in a few hours we can worth though, but on my environment it worked well.

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Then why not use nuget? You already are using nuget generally, so put "vswhere" in your .nuget\packages.config file and it will get pulled if needed* whenever nuget restore is run in the repo. That's what a lot of our repos do - even vswhere itself. You could assume a hardcoded path in your script even, but you'll have to remember to update it if you ever update to a newer version in packages.config. Or do what we do and scan for it.

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I have a version started here: #606 but I can't get the build tools v141 working in VS2019. I don't want to mix that into this change so I want to get that sorted out before I make it a real PR.

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@khouzam you should be able to close this now that #606 was merged.

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Fixed in #606,
Thanks!

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