Download Visual Studio Web Installers as a complete package

When you download Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, Team Explorer etc. from the public Microsoft site you always get a small Web installer. Surely enough this does not contain al files, so when you click it, it starts downloading the remaining Gigabytes.

This is nasty sometimes when you are at a server with slow connection or if you need to update multiple PC’s. To overcome this, the Visual Studio Team included a nice little trick that allows you to download all files up front.

When you call the installer with the /layout option, you get the option to select a download location.

To illustrate this a short example

1. Download Visual Studio 2013.2 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42666). Notice the file size of 1.7 MB
2. Open a command prompt
3. Run VS2013.2.exe /layout 

   

4. Download to a location

   

Your download starts right away!

Hope this helps!