Adding Office 2010 Interop (PIA) in Visual Studio 2012

Question

I am writing an application in VB.NET that will send emails using outlook. My problem is that I need the Office 2010 PIA to do this. The following are the steps I have already tried (I am using Visual Studio Express 2012):

• Restarted the machine
• Downloaded Office 2010 PIARedist and installed it
• Restarted Visual Studio
• Restarted the machine again
• Uninstalled Office and the PIA and re-installed Office, making sure that the PIA was selected in the installation options (it was already selected by default, so presumably I installed it the first time I installed Office as well).
• Restarted the machine again
• Downloaded Office 2010 PIARedist and installed it again
• Restarted VS

After each of these steps, the PIA is still not available in "Add Reference" in VS, nor do the files exist on my computer at all (a search for "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.dll" confirms this). I am running Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro. Does anyone know what my problem is here? This seems like a ridiculous amount of headache for such a simple feature.

PS The only reason I need the PIA is to be able to add CC recipients on the email. That's it. If anyone knows how to do that without the PIA, please let me know because I'd much rather just do that and be done with it.

PSS Both times when I installed the PIA itself, the installation ended silently (no indication of success or failure).

Answer 1

In case anyone stumbles on this question, I finally figured out how to add the interop. For some reason, it won't show up in the "Add References" window (maybe it's because I have VS2012 (11.0) and I'm using Office 2010...?) Anyway, I had to manually browse to it to add it. It was located in C:\Windows\assembly (all of the Office 2010 interops were in there). Also interesting was that a search of the entire C drive for 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook' or shortened versions of that string turned up absolutely no results, even though they are on the drive. One last note: although 'Microsoft Office 14.0 Object Library' shows up in the "Add References" window, adding that reference did not allow access to the interop.