I am developing a VSTO plug-in for Outlook so far so good. What is worrying me is how to deploy updated versions of the plug-in.
Since we have some policies I can only deploy manually on the PCs I do not wish to have to visit each PC on each update. So I was wondering if I can somehow put this plug-in in a shared drive and somehow deploy the new files next time outlook is opened.
Any ideas ? Any other solution?
I'm not quite sure on the exact policies which let you deploy the the updated versions only manually, but have you already looked into ClickOnce deployment? You would be able to update all addins centrally:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/1666d2b0-a4d0-41e8-ad86-5eab3542de1e/deploying-office-solutions-to-end-user-computers
As far as I know ClickOnce can also be used from a network share, but I've never tested this by myself:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/71baz9ah.aspx
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I have built a windows app in Visual studios, but I am having a hard time publishing it. I want to be able to publish my app somewhere where the people who I share my app with can download and then automatically receive updates. I have tried squirrel, Clickonce, and MSIX installers but none of them work the way I want them to. Is there another option? Also any ideas where I could publish the updates to? I am looking for something cheap (or even better free). Thanks!
I have written a VSTO for Outlook with a formregion for meeting/appointmentitems in VS 2015.
I deploy this to our desktop computers using ClickOnce.
I would like to use the Windows Installer to install the VSTO for laptops because when I use ClickOnce and the laptop uses Outlook when not connected to the corporate network, the add-in is disabled.
I assume this is because it cannot reach the internal ClickOnce publish location, eventhough the deployment should not check for updates.
I have followed this article to create an installer for the addin.
I followed the all-users steps and the files are installed to the local computer and the registry keys are being created but the Add-in is not loaded in Outlook and it even is not showing up in the list of Addins in Outlook.
Anyone who has had similar issues and knows how to solve this problem? It's driving me crazy for the past 2 days.
There is no such central repository. Your addin most likely gets disabled on startup because of a run-time error.
I have an Office solution for Word 2007 that I publish using ClickOnce. When I publish it to a local directory, I can install the .vsto file and everything works. When I publish it to our web server, though, I cannot install it. The error I get is:
Downloading file:///C:/DOCUME~1/Dave/LOCALS~1/Temp/Application Files/MyApp_1_0_0_0/MyApp.dll.manifest did not succeed.
I have been Googling for most of the day, and have already tried the following:
Added the correct MIME types to IIS 6 config (as described here and here on MSDN).
Created a test certificate, imported it into my trusted root authorities, and signed the app with it.
Published the solution to a network share and tried installing from there. It worked fine.
Tried accessing the MyApp.dll.manifest file directly from the web URL. The browser is able to find the file just fine.
What am I missing? Thanks.
Make sure that Windows Installer 3.1 is installed on the end-users PC. If it's not, you may want to add it as a prerequisite to your application.
Also, you may want to check and see if the application is installed from the Windows Add/Remove Programs screen. If it is in the list, you may need to uninstall the application, first. I know, you're probably thinking 'But the application hasn't been installed yet.'
Quite a few application that are published via ClickOnce. ClickOnce works great most of the time, but every now and then I see users who run into hiccups similar to yours when they try to initially install the application. The best solution is to usually uninstall all prerequisites, reboot, manually re-install the prerequisites (not from the ClickOnce setup.exe file) and then launch the application.
Some of those steps may not be necessary but it tends to fix the problem nearly every single time.
I have created an outlook 2007 add-in project in vs2008, targeting .net 3.5, then migrated the project to vs2010.
I have then published the project from vs2010 to a web site, and installed the add-in using click-once to a virtual machine running xp, .net 3.5 sp1, and outlook 2007. This all works great and I can see my add-in within outlook. Publish update settings are set to update the add-in at startup rather than every 7 days.
However when I then make a simple change to the add-in, update the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion of the add-in project, and then publish the updates, when I run outlook it doesn't detect that there is a new version, and just runs the current one that is installed.
I can see that the publish has generated a new setup.exe and added a new folder to the 'Application Files' folder with the current (autogenerated) publish version.
Can anyone suggest how I can get the update to be deployed to the client?
Edit:
I left the VM without outlook running for a while (over lunch) and then came to start it up and it detected the latest update and installed it. However now when I make another change and re-publish it is not picking it up. I wonder if this has something to do with caching of the files. I have deleted all the temporary internet files on the client vm, but that didn't help.
The reason it is not detecting published updates was due to iis caching the pages.
I added the expiration common header in IIS7 manager and set it to expire immediately, and after that the addin detected each change as it was published.
Double-check and make SURE you have it set to check every time they open the application and not just once a day.
I'm currently using ClickOnce to install myapp.exe. But now I've added Outlook 2007 addin support, myaddin.dll.
So, how can I install both exe and addin with ClickOnce.
I don't think you can package them together per se. That's not supported (yet). But what you CAN do is deploy them to the webserver separately, and then have the desktop application invoke the install link for the Outlook Add-In when it runs. Just do a Process.Start("iexplore.exe", "http://myapp.com/myaddin.vsto")
It might get complicated depending on which version of Office you're deploying for.
I think it can be done by adding the .exe project as a dependency of the addin project. I read a little that said that's the way it's done, but haven't tried it personally.