Can the Visual Studio 2012 C++ Redistributable be installed automatically with a TFS Build?

Question

I have an ASP.Net project that's using the ClearScript.V8 library which relies on the Visual Studio 2012 C++ Redistributable to work. I'm faced with the prospect of having to install this on 50+ machines and I'm curious if I can get TFS to do it for me.

I realize this straddles somewhere between Stack Overflow and Server Fault so I'm asking on both sites.

Answer 1

Assuming that the binaries for ClearScript.V8 is included in your project (either as files copied to the bin folder or as a NuGet package) you should be able to also include the necessary Visual C++ redistributables files as binary files in your project. They will then be stored in TFS.

If you prefer NuGet packages you can to set up a local NuGet repository within your organization and create a NuGet package with the necessary DLLs which you then can reference from your project. If NuGet package restore is configured for your solution the package will be downloaded before the solution is built. In VS2012 you will have to make some customizations for this to happen on a Team Foundation Build server.

If you are unsure which DLLs you need to include you can use a tool like Dependency Walker to discover which DLL's are required, or you can debug the application and see which DLLs are loaded in the modules window. Microsoft has some information which DLLs to redistribute .

If you are having problems with conflicting versions of a redistributable DLL getting loaded you can create a side-by-side manifest to ensure that the correct DLL version is loaded into your application. However, as your application is hosted within ASP.NET this is somewhat tricky because w3wp.exe is executed by IIS outside your direct control. You will have to create an activation context to configure the manifest used by your application.

Answer 2

If you need to have things installed on your server for a build I would recommend that you use Chocolatey.

• chocolatey.org/

This is an implementation of NuGet in PowerShell to explicitly solve the issue that you face. You can create a powershell file that installs all of the bits that you need and easily include it as a pre build step in TFS 2013. You can use the PowerShell activity from the TFS Community Build Tools to call the PowerShell in TFS 2010 or 2012.