Office XP Shared Addin VS 2008
I am trying to create a generic addon using VS 2008 for Office XP (Excel, to be exact). However, after creating the project in Visual Studio and changing the references to Office XP (besides Extensibility, which I can't seem to find a copy for office xp) and adding excel.exe to the references. I can't seem to get the add-on to install on any computers.
Does anyone have any tutorials on writing Office XP Add-ins with VS 2008 (Com Addins)?
Does anyone know a link I should have or something else that I should have installed on a PC?
I have three test PCs, they have office xp, 2003 and 2007, and I can write an addin using 2003 links that work on this, but not in another box. One is with office xp on it, but also office xp PIA and .NET installed, and the other is with office xp only.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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I eventually found a problem with this.
The problem originated from KB 908002 entry . Unfortunatley to run the fix you need to install Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2003, otherwise it won't deploy the fix and so I looked into it a few times. I ended up finding an old copy of VS2005 and Office 2003 on a spare machine, installed the hotfix, created an installer, and tried it on an Office XP machine and everything was fine.
There are two fixes that are required to work on any Office XP computer:
extensibilityMSM.msi - installs the extensibility.dll
lockbagRegKey.msi - adds a fix to a registry key
I couldn't find them to download separately from the KB908002 hotfix, but I have copies locally.
After applying these fixes, it was easy to use COM Addins like using VSTO, and it took me less than an hour to write the actual code. I am not looking for a way to include them in the MSI installer as prerequisites.
Any questions put them in a comment and I will try to update as soon as possible.
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@PintSizedCat - Here is a link to the msdn blog showing how to extract msi without installing VS2005.
See "Building a COM Extra Partition Installation Project" - use command line:
vs2005-kb908002-enu-x85.exe / T: "C: \ Test" / C
For us it was Excel 2003 with .Net 2.0 and the extensibility.dll was missing. I don't think VS2008 / VS2010 have this as a prerequisite. The dll is not redistributable (according to this blog - see the Answer section) - you have to use msi to redistribute it.
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