Visual Studio 2017 in App Volumes - Capture Licensing?

[VirtuallyANewb]

App Volumes 2.18, Horizon 7.10, Win10 x64 1803, using Instant Clones.

I'm trying to get an App Vol of Visual Studio 2017 installed and the only issue I have is with licensing. The guide states that after the AppVol is built, the user should be able to launch the app and insert the serial; however, 'unlock with serial' is never given as an option to the user.

I created a batch file that uses PID.exe to insert the right license, but it resets with every session since we use Instant Clones.

Does anyone know where that Reg Key is stored so that I can set a UEM/DEM capture for it?

[ijdemes]

There is a Visual Studio config file available from the community --> Microsoft Visual Studio.zip

Not sure if this matches your VS version, but you can try it out.

Otherwise, you can use tools like RegShot (https://sourceforge.net/projects/regshot/) or ProcMon (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon).

RegShot does a before/after comparison, which is easy to use.

[pchapman · Accepted solution]

I've found this document which states the only supported scenarios for deploying VS with App Volumes is to use writables (yuck!)

VMware Knowledge Base

I'm working on this myself for 2019.

I first tried this method:

Visual Studio 2015 in standard appstack  however these commands resulted in unlicensed visual studio (not sure why...)

And then I tried just capturing without using those commands, and somehow it's magically licensed at every login.  I need to talk to the person who built the offline installer to see if they somehow baked the license key into the installer.

Good luck, I'll update if I figure out what's goin on in my environment.

[VirtuallyANewb]

pchapman's link to the other forum post worked for me. I was able to embed the following commands into the startup.bat for that AppVolume's MountPoint:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\DDConfigCA.exe"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\StorePID.exe" [product key including the dashes] [MPC]

[pchapman]

Sadly adding those lines to the startup.bat doesn't seem to work for my VS 2019 Pro.  The strange thing is, if I right click the file and run as administrator after logging into the VM, it does license it successfully..