Integrate the VcRedist PowerShell Module with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)

The VcRedist PowerShell Module by Aaron Parker provides an easy to use evergreen module to integrate the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes into your MDT Reference Images.

If you are using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to build your Reference Images and Citrix Master Images, you are most certainly trying to include the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables for Visual Studio into your Reference Images. Recently I switched to the VcRedist PowerShell Module by Aaron Parker to achieve this task and with this blog post I’m going to show you how to do this yourself.

This post assumes that you already have a working MDT setup up and running and are familiar with the concept of Reference and Master Images. This post will only describe one possible way of how to include the VcRedist module into your MDT workflow.

The PowerShell Code used by me for the integration with MDT, can be found at my GitHub repository: https://github.com/xenadmin/applications/tree/master/Microsoft/MDT-VcRedist

First grab the VcRedist-Install.ps1 from my GitHub repository, adjust the variables according to your needs and execute the script:

VcRedist-Install.ps1
VcRedist-Install.ps1

The result will look similar to this:

MDT - Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables
MDT – Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables

Add the Bundle Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables to your MDT Task Sequence or to a new Bundle, if you install any more Dependencies and Runtimes:

MDT Task Sequence
MDT Task Sequence

To make the VcRedist Bundle evergreen, grab the second script VcRedist-Update.ps1 from my GitHub repository and add it to your Task Scheduler:

The command for the Task Scheduler task is:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "C:\Source\Scripts\VcRedist-Update.ps1"

All credits for the VcRedist PowerShell module and the excellent documentation of it go out to Aaron Parker. This blog post just shows how easy it is to use and one way to use it with MDT Reference Images.

If you do have any question or comments, please put them below. Thank you!

Author: Marco

Marco is an IT-System administrator and IT-Consultant with 10+ years experience. He is specialized in the delivery of virtual Apps and Desktops with Citrix solutions. In 2017 he has been awarded Citrix Technology Advocate by Citrix for his community work (#CTA). His second core area is availability & performance monitoring with Zabbix, a leading open-source solution. His employer is the German IT-Company ANAXCO, which is developing a Transport Management Software (TMS) based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. More about Marco

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