I've been spending the last few days trying to create a new build script utilizing Microsoft TFS 2010.   Part of my build includes the creation of MSI packages using InstallShield 2011.

When using a full version of InstallShield 2011, there is no TFS integration that I can find.  The TFS integration, as mentioned on Flexera's web site, appears to come only when you install the InstallShield LE that comes with Visual Studio and then you create an InstallShield Project within your Visual Studio solution.

To run InstallShield from within the TFS workflow, I'm using an InvokeProcess activity to call IsCmdBld.exe on the build agent.  After turning setting the Logging Verbosity to 'Diagnostic' on my build definition, I found the following error each time the call to IsCmdBld was performed:

ISDEV : fatal error -7159: The product license has expired or has not yet been initialized.

I logged into the build agent server and made sure that InstallShield was properly registered and working.   I also performed the MSI build on the build agent using the exact command used in the InvokeProcess activity, and it worked as expected.  After many hours of searching the web and trail-and-error, I determined that the error message was likely wrong.

The TFS service on the build agent I was connected to was running under the NT AUTHORITY\Network Service.  Apparently any calls to IsCmdBld require administrative rights, which this account did not have.  I then found out that one of my coworkers had created a domain account specifically for the build agents that was a domain administrator account.   Once he configured the build agent to run under that account, the -7159 error went away.