If you've stumbled upon this post, it most likely means that you're trying to install or update Visual Studio 2017 Community or Enterprise using the Visual Studio Installer tool. As you can easily notice, the installation phase is splitted into 2 steps: the download, which happen first, and the actual install.
The issue we're talking about is related to the installation phase of the Win10SDK module, precisely Win10SDK_10.0.17763 at the time of writing - but we know that the issue also happened before and will most likely happen with future versions of the Win10SDK package as well.
The problem
The issue can be easily summarized with the following screenshot:
When this happens, the window GUI appear to be still responding and not locked up: however, pressing the Cancel button does nothing and basically hangs the tool undefinitely until its process is manually killed using Task Manager.
Such scenario can be troublesome, especially if you're performing a "standard" VS2017 update, because you will be basically unable to launch Visual Studio until you fix that.
The setup for this installation of Visual Studio is not complete. Please run the Visual Studio Installer again to correct the issue.
needless to say, restarting and re-running the Visual Studio Installer will bring the same result: when it will try installing the Win10SDK, the tool will become stuck again.
The fix(es)
As this post from the VS developer community explains, the problem's cause is related to a silent PowerShell script that gets executed during the Windows App Certification Kit installation phase that
Workaround #1
Luckily enough, the workaround for such issue is actually rather simple:
- Navigate to the Microsoft Windows 10 SDK official web page.
- Download the Win10SDK installer executable (or the ISO image if you prefer).
- Run it manually using administrative priviledges (very important).
- After the setup is done, launch the Visual Studio Installer and install (or update) Visual Studio 2017.
As you can see, installing the SDK with administrative priviledges is the key to work around the Windows App Certification permissions issue without having to mess with the existing Local Group Policies. If you don't do that, you'll most likely get the following:
Workaround #2
If running the Windows 10 SDK installer with administrative priviledges is not enough to fix your issue, you can try to temporarily enable the Local Group Policy using the Windows built-in Group Policy Editor in the following way:
- Launch the Group Policy Editor: Start > Run > gpedit
- Navigate through Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Powershell (see screenshot below)
- Set the Turn on Script Execution switch to Enabled, then sets its execution policy to Run all scripts.
Once done, try install or update Visual Studio again.
Workaround #3
If none of the above workarounds worked, the last thing you can do is to uninstall and reinstall Visual Studio from scratch using the Visual Studio Installer tool: such procedure can be time-consuming, but is 100% guarranteed to work and will bring you back a clean installation of the latest version of VS2017.
Conclusion
That's it, at least for now: we sincerely hope that this post will help other Visual Studio developers to work around this nasty issue, hoping that Microsoft and the VS team will fix it soon enough. If you have additional workarounds to suggest, feel free to leave a comment and we'll be more than happy to add them to the list.
