Install Workflow Designer on client workstation

Server is a pre-requisite to Designer, so it always gets installed.  I believe the technical reason for this is because Designer needs to be able to run projects in the debugger.  Executing a process in the debugger basically involves just publishing to a temporary virtual directory and then running it from there, which is not altogether different than running a process from IIS on a Workflow Server.  If you had a machine where you had Designer but couldn't debug, you'd have to move/publish a Workflow project somewhere else just to run/test it, and you'd quickly realize the benefit of having Server installed on the Designer machine.

From a licensing standpoint, though, your "Designer-only" machine does not have to have a Server license.  If that machine is only given a Designer license, then you can work in the debugger from Designer on that machine until you are ready to publish the project.  When you are ready to publish the project, you will need to publish to a machine that has a license for Workflow Server, and which of course has Workflow Server installed.  So it is possible and also practical to have Server installed on a machine but un-licensed...it just means you can't publish to or have published projects running from that machine.

Ok, that's fair enough.  Does that mean that I have to have IIS installed on my machine as well?

Designer is typically installed on a machine where IIS is present, but, it can be installed on a machine without IIS.  I don't know what the official Technical Support stance is on this, I'm just saying that I have personally installed IIS on Windows XP with no IIS and it does work.

The reason that it is able to execute processes in the debugger without IIS is because Workflow ships with an internal web server.  In the main Designer window, click File / Edit Tool Preferences, and in the Debugging Deployment section, you'll see where you can set the debugger to either use IIS or the internal web server.  If you install on XP without IIS, it should already be set to internal web server...if it's not, you'll need to set it to that.

Note that when you're installing on the non-IIS machine, the installer will warn you about this fact (second screenshot below)  No big deal, though...just ignore it.  The settings in the first screenshot below work well for installing Designer-only, e.g. on Windows XP with no IIS.

I have done very little testing of Designer on XP with no IIS present, but it seems to work fine in the times I have used it in that environment.  Good luck...

Are there any parameters that can be used to create a quiet install of Workflow?  I want to publish a Designer package to our DS for future Workflow users, with all of the settings already filled in.  I have created an XML settings file through the installer (version 7), but I want the entire process to be automated.