* Is this allowed per VS' ToS?
* I wonder if Microsoft intentionally doesn't provide this first party to force everyone to install VS, especially the professional/enterprise versions. One could imagine that we'd have a vsproject.toml file similar to pyproject.toml that just does everything when combined with a minimal command line tool. But that doesn't exist for some reason.
Microsoft doesn't seem to care unless you're a company. That's the reason community edition is free. Individual licenses would be pennies to them, and they gain more than that by having a new person making things in their ecosystem. It's in their interest to make their platform accessible as possible.
Visual Studio does have that functionality, via vsconfig files: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/impor...
Doesn't look like it's versioned, or installs Visual Studio itself.
For Visual Studio components that are versioned (like the C++ compilers/libraries), the version number is included in the component name.
You still have to install the tool that processes pyproject.toml so that doesn’t seem fair to hold against it. You are right that you still have to know whether to install 2022 or 2026.
Curl the VS Build tools exe, then run the build tools command to install what's in the .vsconfig.