"Visual Studio 16 2019" stopped working with GitHub Actions

Question

I have a project using GitHub Actions and I'm still on Visual Studio 16 2019. However my build job just stopped working after months of working just fine.

My job is running on windows-latest like so:

jobs:
  build-windows:
    runs-on: windows-latest

And then I'm generating the build files with CMake like so:

    - name: Configure CMake
      shell: bash
      working-directory: ${{github.workspace}}/build
      run: cmake $GITHUB_WORKSPACE -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=$BUILD_TYPE -DBUILD_UNIT_TESTS=ON

However, without doing any changes the Windows builds have started failing:

Run cmake $GITHUB_WORKSPACE -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=$BUILD_TYPE -DBUILD_UNIT_TESTS=ON
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:3 (project):
  Generator
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

See also "D:/a/ttvg/ttvg/build/CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
    Visual Studio 16 2019

  could not find any instance of Visual Studio.

A link to the full GitHub Action file is here: https://github.com/zethon/ttvg/blob/master/.github/workflows/windows.yml

A link to the last build job can be found here: https://github.com/zethon/ttvg/runs/5352280995?check_suite_focus=true

Any insight would be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

Specifying the windows-2019 instance instead of windows-latest should fix this, until the 2019 image gets deprecated.

jobs:
  build-windows:
    runs-on: windows-2019