At my company we really like for our development tools to be able to be used from perforce, without having been installed. For a lot of tools (perforce, gcc compiler, snc compiler, even maya) this works after some tweaking, but for Visual Studio 2005 we could not get it to work. As far as we could see, the problem was caused by mspdbsrv.exe. When VS2005 was not installed, the linker would regularly exit with an error about a corrupt pdb. When VS2005 is installed, we almost never see this error.
Does anybody know if this is possible with Visual Studio 2010?
Yeah, mspdbsrv.exe would be a hangup. It is a service required to arbitrate access to the program database to allow concurrent compilation. Can’t get a service going without getting the registry entries right.
This did not improve in VS2010. It has an entirely new build system, based off MSBuild. There’s a ton of stuff that needs to be set just right in the registry. Pretty unlikely to get that right and trouble-free without using the installer. Takes half an hour or so, not worth your time.