@nik-m2 thanks, for doing the work! In principle this is a much better and thorough solution than the quick fix proposed in #171 (will close it if this gets merged).
Using vswhere to drive the version selection process also eliminates the currently buggy behavior to not always selecting the newest available VS version. Nevertheless, checking whether CMake supports the selected version seems like a good idea.

However, ignoring the VC++ Build Tools Workload would be a showstopper for me, because none of the nodejs only developers in my Team need nor want a full Visual Studio installation which is also the case for (transitive) package consumers and CI environments. Furthermore this would make the cursed but widely used windows-build-tools unusable with cmake-js.
@nik-m2 Did you encounter any technical obstacles which led to the exclusion? Would you mind me adding support for said workload?

@BurningEnlightenment No problem! I'm glad you like my solution. I love deleting code 😈

That's great to know I don't need the full Visual Studio version, I have only testing a few work flows. Do you know if windows-build-tools will still work with, and won't break a normal Visual Studio installation?

I didn't run into any technical problems, just haven't used it before. I mentioned it in case it would be a problem, so go ahead by all means!

EDIT:

I added the check for the C++ build tools, but unfortunately -property installationPath doesn't seem to work with only windows-build-tools or VC++ 2017 Build Tools. Maybe there is another property that could be used, I couldn't find much documentation on the available properties

EDIT2:

Added a check for windows-build-tools npm package. Only workflow mentioned that has not been tested is C++ build tools without windows-build-tools and Visual Studio

One easy solution at this point would be to add a --force flag to cmake-js configure to continue even if generator checks fail

or

Use the old method as a fallback

It got kinda complicated in the end. Please help me on verify this. If you have a complete VS or just build tools installation at hand tell us the results there.

@unbornchikken With what I currently have I am able to detect a full installation only. I added detecting windows-build-tools as an attempt to give better support. I have tried with a partial installation but I'm not certain that I will be able to create a typical use case as I haven't used a partial VS installation. It would probably be best if someone who has used that workflow before has tested it.

This would probably work best if I dropped the windows-build-tools check, restored the old detection, then added check using -property installationPath that would try and use the backup method on failure.

The overall effect of this PR would then simply added better support for people who do have -property installationPath (maybe just full install), and leave any workflow that didn't have that property alone