Installing Team Foundation Client - The *HARD* way

I was trying to do something that seemed like a simple task, and mostly is: installing a piece of software on my machine. As most setups installing the Team Foundation client should be relatively easy.. just a matter of implementing the Next, Next, Finish pattern.

But not this time.. clearly the Installation Gods (neighbors of the Demo Gods) were against me.

It kept telling me that it could not install the ‘Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime’. Looking at the logs made it clear that I had some previous .NET beta’s and ctp hanging around for .NET 2.0

After some searching on the internet, I came across Aaron Stebner’s blog, having a posting about How to manually cleanup a failed .NET Framework 2.0 install. Furthermore, I downloaded the Auto Uninstall tool from this location.

Trying all of the above steps (which are basically about manually stripping .NET 2.0 from your machine) I still had no luck. I could be that somewhere in the past I didn’t keep the exact uninstallation order, as prescribed on the Microsoft page. I read at several locations, that when that happens (especially when you do NOT uninstall the .NET Framework 2.0 as the LAST one), so can get into a situation that is “unsupported“.

So I was facing rather harshe measures (like reinstalling my box).. So I though, lets poke around some more.

First of all, I found some more subnodes in HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftFusion which also contained 2.0 versions with earlier build numbers than the RC1 version, and I decided I could live without them. Sadly, this did not help though.

So I went one step further and explored the install dirs of Team Foundation Client to see what was in there, and I found a sub-directory called WCU which contained separate setups for the parts that were failing the install. It also contained a sub dir for the Visual Studio tools for Office Runtime. Running the vstor.exe in there separately did not get me much further though. It was still failing because it detected old 2.0 stuff. So I decided to unpack the setup package using winrar. This left me with a directory containing an MSI file.

Magically, running the MSI and after that the install.exe left me with a succesfully installed Office Runtime! Hurray!!

So I tried the overall setup again and now it failed on the Document Explorer. So I started that one seperately from the WCU subdir and it then also felt comfortable to install itself on my system.

Then, retrying the overall install only need to do the setup of Team Explorer, which succeeded.

So after all that I finally have TFC running happily on my machine.. and it seems to be working too

Share this