I made an application (called WI Assistant) that is a TFS Application.
I got a bug report with this error: Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.
I assume that they don't have this because they don't have Team Explorer installed.
Can I package that DLL up and distribute it with my app? Or should I tell them to install Team Explorer?
I'm going to go with no from looking at your application. There's a blog post here that says what can be done without a CAL for TFS. So at a minimum they'd need a CAL to use it if you distributed that with your appliation.
I'm no expert on this so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I agree with Ryan. I'm pretty sure that the current EULA for the Team Explorer bits does not allow for re-distribution and so you have to tell them to install Team Explorer first.
Before you can distribute any code that isn't yours, you need a licence. If you don't have a licence that says you can redistribute, then you shouldn't. Unusually on this forum, I'm a lawyer aspiring to be a programmer rather than the other way around. But it also means I'm not conversant with the specific licence terms for TFS.
Purely as an aside, my observation is that the mindset of programmers is ideally suited to practicing law. The ability to deconstruct problems and represent solutions in defined chunks is what you need to draft good contracts. I also look at some of the answers given to legal questions on here and they're pretty good. I'm hoping that it works both ways, namely that the mindset of a lawyer will help me pick up the skills I want in programming. So far, I can only conclude that the requirement for experience is just the same.
To be precise, the mentioned DLL (and other TFS client libraries) is available as part of the Visual Studio SDK and can be found under:
%Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies
Therefore the The Visual Studio SDK in the other license that could referenced. Certainly, the need for CAL is not that obvious.