How to perform a silent install of Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer

  • Article

I have previously posted instructions for performing a silent installation for Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions. A customer read those previous blog posts and asked a follow-up question about how to perform a silent installation of Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer, which is the client software needed to access Team Foundation Server.

Team Explorer setup is architected in a way that is similar to the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, but the silent installation instructions are a bit easier because unattended INI file creation was not specifically disabled in setup UI like it was for the Express Editions.

How to perform a silent install of Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer

Here are the steps that you can use to perform a silent installation of Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer:

  1. Launch Team Explorer setup in unattended INI creation mode by running <Team Foundation source location>\tfc\setup.exe /createunattend <path to INI file to create>

  2. Step through the setup UI and enter your product key, etc. Note that the setup UI will not appear any differently for unattended mode than for normal install mode, so it will appear that you are about to install the product even though you are only intending to create an INI file

  3. Click the Install button to create the INI file. When setup advances to the completion page, it will appear to have failed and will show you a dialog similar to the following:

    Team Explorer unattended INI creation error

    This error is incorrect and can be safely ignored.

  4. Launch Team Explorer setup in unattended install mode by running <Team Foundation source location>\tfc\setup.exe /unattendfile <path to INI file listed in step 1 above>

Please note that the above steps are not documented with the product because this unattended mode is not officially supported. Unattended INI creation mode is not specifically blocked in the Team Explorer setup UI code, but it is also not an "official" feature, and as such has not been tested as thoroughly as other setup features. That being said, it appeared to work fine for me in the scenarios that I tried.

More in-depth details about Team Explorer silent installation

  • If you plan to create an INI and install Team Explorer on Windows Vista, you will need to use a workaround similar to the one I previously described here to prevent setup from trying (and failing) to install the .NET Framework 2.0, which is already a part of the OS on Vista.
  • If you want to be able to suppress reboots during Team Explorer silent installation, you will need to manually install each of the prerequisites as I described in this blog post about suppressing reboots during Visual Studio 2005 silent install. Team Explorer setup suffers from the same bug that I described in that post, so the same type of workaround must be applied.
  • I don't know of a way to automate the installation of the server pieces of Team Foundation Server. However, there is a set of walkthroughs for configuring and administering the server-side pieces of Team Foundation Server that may be useful to you.

<update date="1/21/2010"> Fixed broken link to image. </update>