Installing NCrunch on nicknamed multiple installations of Visual Studio 2017

Visual Studio 2017 supports side-by-side installation of multiple versions. Very handy, but I am wondering how / whether this is supported by NCrunch. Am I entitled by my license to install it on a single computer to each instance (nickname) of Visual Studio, or do I need separate licenses?

And, perhaps more importantly, would you consider supporting this from the installer? Currently, the installer does not recognize the new instances (I tried Repair, but it had no noticeable effect). I know there's a manual installation option, I'll see whether that works.

(as an aside, this is mainly to create a repro on a "clean" installation of VS2017 for earlier issues reported, to be sure I haven't messed with anything)

Hi,

See here for details - https://ncrunch.uservoice.com/forums/245203-feature-requests/suggestions/19682887-support-multiple-visual-studio-2017-installations.

To my knowledge, it's not possible to build an MSI with multiple dynamic installation paths. Presently, if you're running multiple VS instances, you need to install the product manually using the manual install instructions on the download page.

There are no licensing issues related to multiple instances. Licenses are per user, not per instance :)

Thanks. I didn't see that feature request (I searched for "nickname"). I don't think it is impossible with MSI, but you'll probably need customized actions. This post (https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/solutions/21956/view.html) explains that any VS2017 gets a directory in

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Packages\_Instances\

Each directory has a unique hash value, but its subdir contains a state.json file, which includes the nickname of that installation, the base path, the extension path and everything else. Whether this is the easiest method to use, I don't know, but it at least appears to be conclusive, which is a good thing.

Meanwhile I'm totally fine with using the ZIP installer :).

In case you're considering this at some point in time, I have asked Microsoft to update vswhere to be able to enumerate by nickname. Not sure it helps with MSI installations, but here it is just in case: https://github.com/Microsoft/vswhere/issues/104 (it is done/resolved, but only as specific build/download, will be public soon though).

Also, it looks like VSIX now has more capabilities, perhaps enough to make it easier to switch to it for VS2017+ installs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/breaking-changes-2017