Export Visual Studio Installation Configuration

This is just a minor post about a brand new and rather useful feature included in the Visual Studio Installer since version 15.9.0, released on November 13, 2018.
Should you work at a software development shop with fairly standardized technologies, you might find that new joiners have a hard time setting up their development environments correctly. Visual Studio contains dozens of individual components to select from during installation, and skipping some of them might cause build errors that are hard to diagnose. What we've done in the past was creating Wiki pages for setting up the dev environment, collected the required workloads and components in bullet point lists, and illustrated the whole process with plenty of screenshots. Yet the new devs still made mistakes. The 15.9 release to the rescue!
You can now export and import installation configurations in the Visual Studio Installer to unify components over the dev machines.
The process is easy: you'll need to configure your installation once and install the desired components. When it's done, you'll arrive to the familiar update screen.

Visual Studio Installer update screen

All you need to do is clicking the More drop-down button next to your installed configuration and select the "Export configuration" menu item.

Import and Export configuration features

You can modify the workloads and components to include in the exported configuration, and export all the installation information required to set up a similar environment on another machine.

You can customize the components to be included in the exported configuration

Upon finishing the export, you can start a new installation on another machine by clicking the more drop-down and starting the installation with the Import Configuration menu item.

Starting a new installation by importing a vsconfig adds all selected workloads and components to the new installation automatically

You might want to check the resulting .vsconfig file into your repository to have it in a central location accessible for all new developers. Yay for standardization!

Update:

If you have your .vsconfig file in your solution root directory, then when the solution (or solution directory) is opened, Visual Studio will automatically detect which components are missing and prompt you to install them. See this blog post for details.