How to install Visual Studio 2021 Preview Behind Corporate Proxy

So you are tempted to get your hands on the shiny Visual Studio 2021 Preview, right? But the evil corporate proxy is once again blocking you from expanding your curiosity? Well, fear no more. Stay with me while I’ll walk you through this in literally just a minute!

1. Run Fiddler and make sure that fiddler is pointing to your corporate proxy as its gateway.
   1. Select Tools > Options…
   2. In the Gateway tab, make sure “Use System Proxy (recommended)” is selected.
   3. Make sure Fiddler is taking care of NTLM authentication, by selecting Rules > Automatically Authenticate.

2. Download Visual Studio 2021 Preview setup from the official website.

3. Run the downloaded executable. You will be prompted to enter credentials for a local Administrator. Don’t enter your credentials yet.

4. Open the following path in your File Explorer: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\1

5. Look for a folder that contains another folder called “vs_bootstrapper_d15“. The folder has had a 20 character hexadecimal name in my case (i.e. f9f02c848a65f81ccd57), but I’m pretty sure it is a random name.

6. Look for a file named “vs_setup_bootstrapper.exe.config” and open it in your text editor of choice and add the following snippet to the file and save.

<configuration>
...  
  <system.net>
    <defaultProxy>
      <proxy proxyaddress="http://localhost:8888" bypassonlocal="False" />
    </defaultProxy>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

7. Go back to the credential prompt, enter your credentials and hit OK. You are good to go!