The realistic paths to portable development with VS 2015 tooling are:

: Navigate to the folder where you extracted Visual Studio 2015 Portable, and find the executable file (usually named devenv.exe ). Double-click on it to launch Visual Studio.

: A lightweight, open-source code editor from Microsoft that's highly customizable and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Visual Studio 2015 Portable is well-suited for a variety of use cases, including:

If you are looking for an on the performance of portable IDEs or virtualization, you may want to look into:

: Download the .zip version (not the installer) and create a folder named data in the root directory.