I have been thinking of developing an add-in in office 2013 but the thought hit me..is it backwords compatible with older versions 2010? 2007? ive read a few articles and even some answers that were given here but none of the directly answerd my question.
As a general rule of thumb, you should target your addin at the lowest version of Outlook (2007?).
If there are any version specific features that you want to use, you can use Application.Version to branch your code.
Related
I currently have one Add-In project that supports both 2010 and 2013 versions of Office. The only difference is the setup project I use to install the Add-In. One searches for the 2010 PIA and the other for the 2013 PIA. I'm able to support both versions this way. The only problem is that since I'm using the v4.0 libraries I can't access the tools for supporting inline response in 2013.
I currently have Office 2013 and Visual Studios 2010 installed of my machine, can I updated the references from the Office 2013 installation? I understand that if I update my project to support the inline responses, it might brake the compatibility with 2010. This is fine as I can just have two projects.
Do I need VS2012 or higher to support the Office 2013 libraries?
Okay, this took a little while to figure out. All you need to do is delete the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook and stdole and add the Microsoft Outlook 15.0 Object Library reference. I couldn't find the PIA for the Office 2013 originally as they show up as COM instead in .NET in the Add Reference form in VS2010.
After that, the this.Application.ActiveExplorer() should have inline response events. You don't need VS2012 to support the libraries. While I separated the inline response code by checking the application version, I haven't had the chance to test on Outlook 2010 to make sure it works. I'll edit this answer once I do.
I have developed word addin 2010 using visual studio 2012. I have created setup file using below MSDN link.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc442767.aspx
When i run this for ofice 2010 or office 2013 it works fine but it doesn't work for office 2007.
I though it would be word addin issue so I have created word addin 2007 and still have issue.
Can somebody suggest what can be the issue?
Add-in functionality changed again between Office 2007 and 2010, to support new features like the changed UI (RibbonBar). The addin you created for Office 2010 uses features that did not exist in the Office 2007 apps (Word/Excel etc).
Office Add-ins are typically forward compatible only. That is future version of Office support older older plugins, but the opposite is simply not possible as new features get added all the time.
e.g.
Write an Office 2007 addin and it will likely work on Office 2007, Office 2010 and Office 2013.
Write an Office 2010 addin and it will likely work on Office 2010 and Office 2013.
Write an Office 2013 addin and it will likely only work on Office 2013.
Please note that while they "work" they will often look very old-fashioned as they typically use the older UI elements and not the latest version.
Create a 2007 add-in instead
If you really need Office 2007 support, you need to create a 2007 Add-in instead (as well?). Otherwise you will likely be using features that simply do not exist in Office 2007. The only possible (unlikely) alternative is to add Office 2010 DLLs to the machines, but as you are then effectively upgrading Office I doubt that is legal without a Office 2010 licence (so you might as well upgrade them anyway).
Try to attach to the project the Interop.Word dll of Word 2007.
Also exchange the Office Object Library dll 12- which comes along with Word 2007.
Hope this helps.
I need to ensure that the version of VS2013 I get allows me to do Office development. I understand that Premium allows me to do that, but can't seem to work out if Professional also allows me to do that?
Does anyone know where I can get this info?
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/compare-visual-studio-products-vs this link makes no mention of office type development.
The chart of Visual Studio features does indicate that VS Professional supports Office 365, Office and SharePoint development. You can see this bullet point under section named 'Development Platform Support'.
If you are not convinced by the chart you can always download the 90 day trial of VS 2013 Professional to see that it supports Office development. I think it is one of the options to select during install.
I am trying to develop custom code for an InfoPath 2013 form. I have Visual Studio 2013 Professional installed, but when trying to edit code I get the following message:
The following external components are required to edit your form code. Please install them and try again.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
Visual Studio C# Support
Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications 2012
C# support is installed, along with Visual Studio Tools for Applications 2012.
Does InfoPath 2013 just not support VS2013?
Unfortunately No
MS has really been making some bad decisions lately
Firstly VS2013 was released so they forced people to upgrade if you want to develop for Windows 8.1
Secondly, MS have announced that they are dropping InfoPath and have yet to provide an alternate solution. Support is still available but InfoPath 2013's successor will be another solution.....i'm guessing Azure Forms or SharePoint forms, something like that
Very disappointing
As you have found, adding code to an InfoPath 2013 form requires Visual Studio 2012. I am not aware of a way to use it with any other version of Visual Studio.
Depending on what you plan to use the custom code for, you may be able to get by with the qRules library (full disclosure: I am one of the developers of this library). It contains many of the most common features for which people tend to use code within InfoPath, and you can use them simply by executing rules within your form, eliminating the need for any version of Visual Studio.
If there is a specific thing you are looking to do with code, I can tell you whether it's possible to do so with qRules, but you should open a separate question for that (and let me know here).
We have an outlook add-in project in visual studio 2008 that uses VSTO 2005. This works with outlook 2003 and outlook 2007 so far.
Now my company is moving to visual studio 2010 so I tried to migrate to visual studio 2010 with VSTO 2005, I am having a few compilation problems. My question:
Will VSTO 2005 work on vs 2010 and the project will compile and run as usual?
If not, is there any workaround to support outlook 2003 for development with VS 2010, if it exists will it work on outlook 2010 also.
If this is not possible, is it advisable to keep two separate projects one for outlook 2003 (in vs2008) and other for outlook 2007-2010 (in vs 2010)?
Thanks for your time
I researched VSTO 2010 upgrade options for a project a couple months ago. This MSDN link lists which versions of Office can be targeted by VSTO 2010. It states: "If you need to create a solution that can also run in Microsoft Office 2003, you must use an earlier version of Visual Studio." To specifically answer your questions.
No
The only workaround that was mentioned anywhere was to use C++ to write your own Office addin loader. I did not find any examples of how to do this, and it did not seem like a reasonable option anyway.
Maintaining two projects is an option if you really need to support office 2003. It just depends on if you are willing take on the extra work of maintaining two code bases.
Another option would be to keep using VS2008 to target Office 2003-2010. However that would prevent you from taking advantage of .NET 4 and any Office 2010 specific features.
We simply decided to no longer support Office 2003 once we moved to VS2010.
A great part of my customers are still running Office XP / Office 2003 installations, and are only planning for an upgrade to Office 2010. I think in big corporate environments Office 2003 will stay until end of 2012.
So if you want to support this share, you'll have to consider this large client base.
I'm working a lot with a third-party tool called Add-in Express. This allows to create add-ins for different office versions independently from the VSTO complications, because they use their own loader. I've targeted Office 2003 with commandbar-based UI and Office 2007/2010 with ribbon UI in the same add-in with the same codebase.
May be it's worth to have a look at this tool.