We have an issue with an Outlook 2007 AddIn (created on a Windows 7 development machine with Visual Studio 2008/VSTO).
It installs with the MSI installer on these machines:
- the development machine
- a Windows XP machine
Install initially succeeded on a Vista machine, but after installing an updated version of the AddIn, it gets disabled when starting Outlook. We suspect it might be related to how Vista handles security.
Have anyone encountered issues specific to installing VSTO AddIn on a Vista machine?
(Please note that the AddIn in our case gets installed alright, but is 'just' disabled when starting Outlook.)
The add in might be throwing an exception.
An unhandled exception causes the add in to be disabled.
We hit this issue on some random machines and after much head scratching, it turned out that Office.Interop was not installed on the client. We had assumed it would be installed with Office 2007 - which it appears to be in many cases.
Related
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 written a MS Project addin using Visual Studio 2010 and the VSTO that ships with it. I am testing this with Project 2013.
The addin seems to work fine with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
However, under Windows 8 and 8.1, the addin behaves oddly. Specifically:
1) The addin crashes randomly. The solution I found was to run Project 2013 as Administrator (by right-clicking and selecting "Run as Administrator"). This is strange, since I am already logged into Window as an admin!
2) It looks as though some features in the addin is disabled?
Is this something that people have seen before, and if yes, what is the solution>
I figured out the problem. When I don't "Run as Admin", the application is running with reduced privilege. I was under the wrong impression that running apps, while logged in as admin, would make the app run with full privilege.
As far as why "Run as Admin" is needed in Windows 8 and not before, I am guessing that the reduced privilege mode in Win 8 is more restrictive than in previous versions.
We developed an Outlook Add-In for Win 7 with SP1 and .NET Framework 4.0 as a prerequisite. It gets install perfectly on some machine without any hiccup but in other machines (same configuration, Win 7 & SP1) the add-in goes into the 'inactive' state and doesnt load while outlook start-up.
While installing there are no issues or error message getting displayed. What could be the problem? How can I check or debug what could be causing this issue? Any solution or hints on this will be highly appreaciated.
Inactive add-ins are usually caused by a missing reference that wasn't deployed. Try some of these resources:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/haahmadi/archive/2010/05/26/my-vsto-add-in-does-not-load.aspx
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vstotroubleshooter
I am developing a VSTO 2010 Office 2007 Outlook Add-In deployed from Click-Once. On the computer I developed it, running Visual Studio, everything works just fine, but when trying to install it on another computer, the addin is installed, and during the startup screen, It comes under Inactive Applications Add-in.
In Load Behavior, It shows Not Loaded.A Runtime error Occured during the loading of the COM-Add-in.I have changed the Load behavior from 2 to 3 in HKCU under Registry Editor.But it is again reverted back to 2.Not sure how to find the specific error so I can fix it.
Does anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this?
Any ideas anyone might have would be greatly appreciated.
Finally I have found a solution by myself.What I have done is Before I published a solution I was checked .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 Client Profile in prerequisites under Install settings and it works for me now.
I'm trying to create a Shared Addin using VS 2008 for Office XP (Excel to be precise). However, after creating the project in Visual studio and changing the references to Office XP (apart from Extensibility which I don't seem to be able to find a copy for office xp) and adding excel.exe to the references as well. I now don't seem to be able to get the addin to install on any computers.
Does anyone have any guides on writing Office XP addins using VS 2008 (Com Addins I might add)?
Does anyone know the reference that I'm meant to have or things prior that I'm meant to have installed on the pc?
I have three test pcs, this one has office xp, 2003 and 2007 on it and I can write an addin using 2003 references that runs on this but no other box. One with just office xp on it but also office xp PIAs installed and .NET and another one just with office xp on.
Any help would be very much appriciated.
I found the problem with this in the end.
The problem came from a KB entry 908002. Unfortunatley, to run the fix you need Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2003 installed otherwise it won't deploy the fix and so I had glossed over this quite a few times. In the end I found an old copy of VS2005 and Office 2003 on a spare machine, installed the fix, created an installer and tried it on a machine with Office XP and everything worked fine.
There are two fixes that are needed for this to work on any machine with Office XP:
extensibilityMSM.msi - installs the extensibility.dll
lockbagRegKey.msi - adds a fix to a registry key
I couldn't find these to be downloaded seperately from the KB908002 fix 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'm not looking for a way to include these in my MSI installer as prerequesites.
Any questions chuck them in a comment and I'll try and update asap.
You need the PIAs installed as a prerequisite. Does the addin install at all, or fail at installation? An add-in misbehaving at startup may be banned by the host application (Excel). You can reneable it in the Add-in settings dialog in Excel.
#PintSizedCat - Here is a link to a msdn blog that shows how to extract the msi's without having VS2005 installed.
See the section "Building the Shared COM add-in setup project" - use the 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 "The Answer" section) - you must use the msi to redistribute it.