The Microsoft site can be induced to give up different versions.
See: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/thank-you-downloading-visual-studio/?sku=Community&rel=15
Change the '15' to 16, and 17 and see what you get.
Answer from Daniel Poirot on Stack OverflowHow to download Visual Studio Community Edition 2017 (not 2019) - Stack Overflow
Is Visual Studio 2017 community version still available?
How to download Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition for offline installation? - Stack Overflow
Where to download Visual Studio 2017 Community edition from? - Stack Overflow
Videos
The Microsoft site can be induced to give up different versions.
See: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/thank-you-downloading-visual-studio/?sku=Community&rel=15
Change the '15' to 16, and 17 and see what you get.
as today the VS 2017 Community can be downloaded via https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vs_community.exe
I am applying to this company and I'm going to have a technical exam. They told me about the tools that we are going to use (Visual Studio 2017), but I cant find the Visual Studio 2017 Community Version. I have the 2022 community version already installed in my device.
Are there any other 2017 versions that are free to use?
What you are looking for is to make an offline installation.
The Microsoft article Create an offline installation of Visual Studio has the answer.
You have already downloaded the Visual Studio Community Web installer
vs_community.exe.
Use this command line to create a local cache in the folder c:\vslayout
(or choose another folder):
vs_community.exe --layout c:\vslayout --includeOptional --lang en-US
Later on you could use this folder to install on this computer or another, using the same options:
c:\vslayout\vs_community.exe --includeOptional
Note that --includeOptional will result in a huge download.
Use instead the --add parameter to help in limiting the size of the download
to just the components you need.
For that see
Visual Studio workload and component IDs.
Older versions of Visual Studio can be downloaded from:
- Microsoft's own Visual Studio Older Downloads - 2017, 2015 & Previous Versions
- By joining Microsoft's free Visual Studio Dev Essentials.
Ok, I managed to download and install it. Here are my steps:
install nuget CLI from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/install-nuget-client-tools
using nuget install chocolatey as package, more here: https://chocolatey.org/docs/installation#install-using-nugetexe-from-powershell
having chocolatey install VS2017 community package: https://chocolatey.org/packages/VisualStudio2017Community#files
when installing you can pay attention where the files are fetched from. When I am writing this, VS2017 is at: https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/57c99182-2828-4fc1-8b36-271e2472c838/91d7b8d8ba556b1e8723ca67a0f1e2e4a8274f7dfccbeae567e78b22f0db3f6d/vs_Community.exe
so either you download it directly, or switch to chocolatey cache directory (
%TEMP%\chocolatey) and grab vs_community.exeand then run the installer to fetch all the files needed to offline installation
- Saved the "vs_professional.exe" in my user Download directory, didn't work in any other disk or path.
- Installed the certificate, without the reboot.
- Executed the customized (2 languages and some workloads) command from administrative Command Prompt window targetting an offline root folder on a secondary disk "E:\vs2017offline".
Never thought MS could distribute this way, I understand that people downloading Visual Studio should have advanced knowledge of computers and OS but this is like a jump in time to 30 years back.
I have used the exact steps from here and it worked flawlessly : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/install-vs-inconsistent-quality-network
In 3 simple steps:
Step 1 : Download the respective Visual Studio 2017 version from the download page (https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/)
Step 2: Open your command prompt as Administarator, point to where your Visual studio download exe is and execute the following command (this command is specifically for Web & Desktop development) :
vs_community.exe --layout c:\vs2017layout --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb --add Component.GitHub.VisualStudio --includeOptional --lang en-US
Step 3 : Traverse to the path c:\vs2017layout in your command prompt and then run the following command (this command is specifically for Web & Desktop development)
vs_community.exe --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetWeb --add Component.GitHub.VisualStudio --includeOptional
In order for downloads to work at my.visualstudio.com you need to have a subscription of some description. The easiest one (and the only one I have associated with my account) is Visual Studio Dev Essentials:
This subscription is free and it looks like there's a button captioned 'Join Visual Studio Dev Essentials' at the top of your Subscriptions page that you should be able to click to subscribe. Once you've done this, the Downloads page should lead you to:
You can download from there.
It's worth mentioning that Visual Studio Dev Essentials has quite a few other benefits (including Azure credit in the first month, other Azure freebies for the first year and some other goodies) so it's well worth a look in general.
As of August 2025, Visual Studio 2017 community edition can be downloaded from this link https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vs_community.exe without login in to a subscription.
Also, the professional version can be downloaded here https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vs_professional.exe