Office 2003 Add In using VSTO 2005 SE and C# in Visual Studio 2005 Profesional, Win XP

Question

I have developed an Add In for Word 2003 in C# using VSTO 2005 SE. The Add In creates a button near the Help button called International Projects. When the Add In is loaded, it gets some data from a Sharepoint 2007 Library and based on that data, when a button in the International Projects menu is clicked, it generates some custom properties for the running document. On the machine that I developed the Add In it work perfectly. I tried to create a Setup Project in my solution so that I could install the Add In on other machines. I created the Setup using the instructions from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc136646(v=office.12).aspx , http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsto/archive/2008/12/17/deploying-office-2003-solutions-with-windows-installer-mary-lee.aspx and many other sites like these. The problem that I am having is that when I run the setup on a user machine, the setup runs fine, there are no erros in the logs or event viewer, the registry looks to be fine, the files are copied at the address specified in the installer, the add in appears in Add/Remove programs but it doesn't load when starting Word and is not present in Word as a COM Add In. The SetSecurity project I took it from the VSTO 2005 SE Runtime Sample V3, add it to my solution and insert the output in my setup project. I still believe that it is a trust issue between Office and my add in. The PIA for office is present in assembley and the VSTO seams to be installed corectly. I also created another project that simply shows a MessageBox on startup and shutdown and that installs and works fine on the user machine. Some strange things I noticed are the fact that when I build my project there is no .vsto file created but there is a .vsto.manifest file, I read on a forum that vsto runtime might try to use .net 1.1 instead of 2.0 when both are installed, but i installed a patch to solve that and one more that visual studio 2005 might have some problems and I found and installed a patch for that also, but none of this solved my problems. I have been working and trying all sorts of solutions for the past two weeks but without any result. Have you got any experience with creating setup for office 2003 Add ins? If someone does, please help me! Thank you!

Answer 1

I don't envy you - I haven't had to deploy a 2003 add-in in a while, and I can't say I miss these days.

It's not an answer per se, but I noticed that the MSDN link you provide refers to Office 2007; this post, which is specific to Office 2003, may be useful:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537179(office.11).aspx

I remember running into some issues with Excel 2003 add-ins, maybe you'll also find ideas in some of my older posts like this one: http://clear-lines.com/blog/post/VSTO-add-in-with-multiple-assemblies.aspx

Good luck!