[signal11]

My experience of installing VS Community Edition several years ago was that it downloaded a lot of dependencies when I requested a fairly basic C# and C++ environment: versions of SQLXML, Windows SDK, etc, which had to be managed and upgraded separately.

Is it much more self-contained now? perhaps via nuget?

[mastax]

New Installation Experience - A reduced minimum footprint for faster and more customizable installations, as well as support for offline installs.

Visual Studio IDE - A broad range of enhancements in Visual Studio 2017, including reduction in startup and solution load times, sign in and identity improvements, improved code navigation, open folder view, and connected services enable connections between your app and any service on-premises or in the cloud.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-...