With the recent release of the October Power tools for TFS 2008, many people will need to deploy these to multiple machines. The easiest way is to use an unattended install that you can kick off from the command line.
BEFORE YOU BEGIN
- If you include the Windows Shell Extensions, you will be required to reboot after installing the Power Tools before the Shell Extensions will be available
- Both the BPA & TFPS switches below, require Powershell to be installed first.
PREVIOUS POWERTOOL INSTALLS
The October release should update all prior TFS 2008 releases – Dec ’07, Mar ’08, Jul ’08. Users should not have to remove prior installs… unless they had other per-user installs on the machine. In that case, install will fail and manual intervention is required. If the install fails, you can find details of what you need to do in a Word document on the download page where you downloaded the Oct 08 Power tools.
THE COMMAND LINE
The command line I am using at the moment is
msiexec /i tfpt.msi /qb AddLocal="CLI,VSIP,CHECKINPOLICIES,TSX"This does a silent install (shows progress bar) and installs the TFPT utility, the Visual Studio add-ins (including Alerts and Team Members etc), the Check-in policy pack and the Windows Shell Extensions.
You can choose what you want to install by using the following list of values for the AddLocal setting.
| Value | Component |
| BPA | Best Practice Analyser |
| TFPS | Team Foundation Power Shell cmdlets |
| TSX | Windows Shell Extensions |
| TSX_64 | Windows Shell Extensions (64bit) |
| CLI | TFPT.EXE command line |
| VSIP | Visual Studio add-ins (Alerts, Team Members etc) |
| CHECKINPOLICIES | Check-in policy pack |
| PROCESSEDITOR | Process Template Editor |
| ALL | Installs everything EXCEPT the Shell Extensions |
The other msiexec switches shown above are:
/i (Install)
/qb (Quiet with basic display to show progress bar)
You could change the /qb to /qn so nothing is shown on the screen if you wish.
{A quick thanks to Bill Essery for pointing out a few errors that I have now fixed)