Does Visual Studio need to be installed on the TFS build server?

Question

We recently moved to Team Foundation Server 2008 from Source Safe. We are setting up some automated builds and have run into some issues with the publish of click once apps that seem to require additional installs on the build server.

I've seen posts that indicate that the Visual Studio IDE needs to be installed. I've also seen posts that say that installing the .Net Framework SDK would fix the issue. We don't want to install more than we need on the build server, but we also don't want to have to make multiple requests to our server team to install different pieces at different times. So, I'd like to know what most teams end up installing.

If it's important, we don't have a dedicated build server at this point. We are a small team (6 devs, all local). Builds are happening on our main TFS box, the SQL Server piece is the only part that is on a separate server.

Answer 1

Yes, I installed VS on the build server. I followed their manual for setting up TFS.

Answer 2

According to this, Visual Studio shouldn't be required--just the .NET Framework. One other note to consider from the link is that they recommend against builds happening on the TFS box.

Answer 3

If you are just compiling applications in with Team Foundation Build, then the .NET Framework will do - however as soon as you start wanting to do anything more advanced (such as running unit tests and having their results published into TFS) then you will need to bite the bullet and install a Visual Studio Team Edition on your build server. I usually just install a copy of Team Suite on the build server so that people who are licensed to use the various features can have those features run as part of any automated build.

Having to have it installed on your server is not ideal, but gives you the best experience at the present time.

Regarding using your TFS server as your build server, this is not recommended for larger teams because builds tend to be pretty CPU and IO intensive beasts - however for a small team such as yours and assuming that you don't have too many build definitions that could run at once you should be able to get away with it.