In JDK-8372943 it became quite apparent that the current way of specifying a nonstandard Visual Studio installation when configuring the JDK build is severely lacking. There are two possible ways to do it:

--with-tools-dir: Set this parameter to point to an existing directory 2 or 3 levels below (inside) the Visual Studio installation root.

VS1XXCOMNTOOLS: Set the corresponding env var before calling configure. This variable used to be set globally when installing Visual Studio, but newer version stopped setting it.

I think we need an explicit configure option for specifying the location of a Visual Studio installation to use. Ideally we should also be able to detect the version from it to avoid having to also specify that.