VSix deployment fails- Is VS SDK required on target machine?

Question

I have a vsix package that has been built and installed on my machine and works well. I tried a double click install on a machine that does not have the VS Sdk. When I click on the icon in the View-OtherWindow I get an error that says "exception has been thrown by the target of the invocation". Any thoughts?

Answer 1

The VS SDK is not required on the target machine to deploy a VSIX. It is possible that you are relying on DLL's from the SDK which need to be deployed with the VSIX. That's just idle speculation though because the exception message is very vague.

The best way to tackle this problem is to hook up a debugger on the target machine and see what the root cause exception is. Knowing that will help us track down this issue.