How to install Visual Studio 2015 on a different drive
Use VirtualBox. Create a machine on the drive you wish. Enable guest aditions and activate seamless mode.
Benefits:
- The ENTIRE installation is on the second drive. will work even with a 32gb ssd. (This is the main selling point, considering that Visual studio with it's additional features exceeds 30gb. If you have the GB to spare this solution is NOT the best for you)
- Uninstalling or backing up is a breeze. Just delete or move the image file. No system file conflicts and dirty registry in case of a corrupted installation.
Drawbacks:
- You need a LOT of ram. I use 4GB (out of 8) and 2 (out of 6) cores to run comfortably. Even so it is still slower than a normal installation.
- Will not work for applications with extensive 3d graphics. If you want to work with forms it's fine but if you want to create a 3d game for android using say xamarin then forget it.
- Testing the program takes several seconds to compile (minutes for android apps). This may not seem much but during development these seconds do add up.
This is the solution i am using and am very happy with it but i am not your average professional programmer. I just create small windows form applications like file uploaders, chat apps etc. Try it out. It will take some time to setup but this experimentation isn't risky.
Run the installer from command line with argument /CustomInstallPath InstallationDirectory
See more command-line parameters and other installation information.
Note: this won't change location of all files, but only of those which can be (by design) installed onto different location. Be warned that there is many shared components which will be installed into shared repositories on drive C: without any possibility to change their path (unless you do some hacking using mklink /j (directory junction, i.e."hard link for folder"), but it is questionable whether it is worth it, because any Visual Studio updates will break those hard links. This is confirmed by people who tried that, although on Visual Studio 2012.)
Update: per recent comment, uninstallation of Visual Studio might be required before the above applies. Uninstallation command is like this: vs_community_ENU.exe /uninstall /force
After trying to manually uninstall, and then downloading another copy of the VS 2015 community installer for use with the force uninstall command line argument (Original answer by Michael Schuchardt), I was still unable to modify the install directory.
After testing further, I found that Unity (which integrates with Visual Studio as of Unity 5.2) also had to be removed. At this point Visual Studio Uninstaller (link to latest release on Github) can be used for the final removal of remaining any remaining components.
You will now be able to run the Visual Studio Installer and select a directory or, alternatively, run the install from command line using the "/CustomInstallPath ..." argument.
Run installer in command line (Admin) with argument:
vs_community_ENU.exe /uninstall /force
Then:
vs_community_ENU /CustomInstallPath E:\VisualStudio2015