title: Using Microsoft C++ compiler without installing Visual Studio
body: <p>In our team, the devs all have Visual Studio 2012, and we also use TFS2012 build. For space &amp; manageability reasons, we don't install Visual Studio on our (many) build agents. This has worked so far with C# projects (csproj).</p>
  
  <p>Now we want to add support for C++ project (vcxproj). These build on devs' machines, but not on the build agents - we get:
  <code>X.vcxproj(31,3): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props" was not found. Confirm that the path in the &lt;Import&gt; declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.</code></p>
  
  <p>I suppose this is because the C++ compiler &amp; targets are only installed with VS.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is there a way to checkin just the compiler &amp; targets, and set some property in our common.targets to point there?</li>
  <li>Failing that, what is the minimum I need to install on each build agent to support C++ compilation? The least I could find was VS Express, which is still too much to my liking.</li>
  </ol>