MSVC in PowerShell

18 Dec 2025

That is a small post as a reminder for myself about how to bootstrap MSVC environment in PowerShell.

As you may know, the Visual Studio comes with utils that allow you to bootstrap the dev environment. They provide batch files that can be used in CMD easily (and that is actually what all those shortcuts like x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS do). Sometimes I would like to stay in the same PowerShell session, though.

Here is a small snippet that does the trick:

# Visual Studio 2022
$vars = cmd /C '"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64 & set'
# Visual Studio 2026
$vars = cmd /C '"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\18\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64 & set'

$vars | Foreach-Object {
        $_ | Select-String -Pattern "([^=]+)=(.+)"
        | Foreach-Object {
            $var = $_.Matches[0].Groups[1].Value
            $value = $_.Matches[0].Groups[2].Value
            Set-Item -Path Env:$var -Value "$value"
        }
}

That’s it.

 pwsh  msvc

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