How to Install TFC without PPE

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, now available for MSDN subscribers and Express editions freely available to everyone, is a huge application. It takes a while to install and, in the case of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, a long time to patch. Installing or patching multiple copies of shared components can be time-consuming. So if you've installed Visual Studio 2008 already and want to install Team Foundation Client (TFC) you can avoid having to install Visual Studio 2008 Premier Partner Edition (PPE) and save time, though disk space savings are minimal since almost all the PPE files were already installed with VS and a patch to either is cached only once.

Note: the following instructions are not officially supported by Microsoft. If you make a mistake, please simply run TFC\setup.exe from your original installation media.

1. Copy the TFC directory from the DVD to your hard drive or network share.
2. Open the TFC folder you just copied.
3. Open baseline.dat for editing.
4. Under section named "[Complete Component List]" near the top of the file, delete the line that reads "GFN_MID VS PPE".
5. Find the section named "[gencomp135]" and delete the entire section; that is, from "[gencomp135]" to the first blank line, inclusive.
6. Save baseline.dat.
7. Optionally, to save over 300 MB of space delete the WCU\PPE sub-folder.
8. Run setup.exe.

There are alternatives from changing all the Install* values under [gencomp135] to 0, to installing just the vs_setup.msi from an elevated command prompt; however, in the latter case you get neither pre-requisites nor the ability to send anonymous feedback to Microsoft, which honestly does help us make better decisions for future deployment.

If you do simply want to deploy vs_setup.msi for TFC, make sure you run the following from an elevated command prompt:

msiexec.exe /i vs_setup.msi /l*vx "%TEMP%\tfcmsi.log" NOVSUI=1