Hi Billy,

Thank you for contacting us.

Regarding your concern, please note that Microsoft enforces activation per machine to prevent piracy and ensure compliance. You can still install Visual Studio Professional offline, but it requires manual product key entry or volume license setup, not a universal multi-access key. Below are the steps you should take:

• You first need to install Visual Studio online
• Create a layout for offline install, you can check this link for more specific guidance
• Manually download and install missing certificate: 
  1. Download the certificate: http://www.microsoft.com/pkiops/certs/Microsoft%20Windows%20Code%20Signing%20PCA%202024.crt 
  2. Double-click the .crt file to open the Certificate window.  
  3. Click “Install Certificate…”  
  4. Choose “Local Machine” (you may need admin rights).  
  5. Select “Place all certificates in the following store”  
  6. Click “Browse…” and choose: Trusted Root Certification Authorities. Click Next, then Finish.  
  You should see a confirmation message: “The import was successful.”  
• Copy the layout folder that you have just created to your offline device and run this command in the layout folder

    vs_professional.exe --noweb
  

  → Visual Studio Professional 2022 will be install offline
• Go to Help → About Visual Studio → License Status → Click Unlock with a Product Key. Enter the Product Key and click Apply
• Visual Studio creates a request file containing your installation ID. Save this file and transfer it to an internet-accessed device.
• On a device with internet access, go to the Microsoft Licensing Activation site (provided in the Visual Studio activation dialog) → Upload the request file → Microsoft will generate a response file then transfer the response file back to the offline machine.
• In Visual Studio’s activation dialog, select Use Response File → Browse to the file and apply it → Visual Studio will confirm activation.

I hope that these instructions will be helpful! If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out, I'm here to help.

Happy holiday!

If you want to do an offline update from VS17.12 to 17.13 , you can follow below steps:

1. Update the layout to a specific version of the product.

• Go to the Visual Studio 2022 Release History page and download a particular fixed version bootstrapper(e.g vs_Enterprise17.13.0), copy it into your layout, and use it to update the layout to that exact version specified in the bootstrapper.
• Run the --layout command in an elevated prompt to download the latest packages into your layout.

vs_enterprise.exe --layout c:\VSLayout

2. Update your Visual Studio 2022 by running the Visual Studio Installer > Update or you can also use the following command:

vs_enterprise.exe update --noWeb --quiet --installpath "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise"

Update

The easiest and fastest way to update your offline Visual Studio instances: using a minimal offline layout.

Do i have to download the entire VS Layout package everytime if there is an version update?

Unlike a full Visual Studio layout, a minimal layout only contains the updated packages, so it is always smaller and faster to generate and deploy.

1.Generating a minimal layout.

MinimalLayout.exe generate --targetLocation c:\VSLayout\ --productIds Microsoft.VisualStudio.Product.Enterprise --baseVersion 17.12.5 --targetVersion 17.13.0  --languages en-US

2.Update the Visual Studio Installer

vs_enterprise.exe --quiet --update --offline C:\VSLayout\vs_installer.opc

3.Update the Visual Studio application

vs_enterprise.exe update --noWeb --quiet --installpath "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise"

Docs Referred:

Update the layout to a specific version of the product

Update Visual Studio from a layout