Hi!
I seem to have the same problem as many others here; deploying an Office add-in. I have read probably everything available in these frums and others several times over.
My issue is the following;
I have built a shared add-in in managed C# and shimmed it so it works perfectly in my dev environment. My target is Excel 2003, and I am extending IDTExtensibility2 using VS2003 / .NET 1.1, on an XP SP2 box. Signed, sealed and ready to go, or so I thought...
I had a second machine set up with Win2000 Advanced, since this will most likely be the target OS platform and Office 2003. Installed my deplyment packege and saw my enthsiasm go down the drain, as absolutely nothig happened. (I expected a new menu item on the standard bar).
Not losing hope, I have tried changing the distribution so I don't conflict with installed PIA's (they are installed, I checked), Checking the Disabled Items, manually registering the shims with regsvr32, comparing registry entries, registering the managed dlls instead... No matter what I do I can't seem to make it work on the deplyment computer. I have tried on several other machines as well, even one with VS2003 installed, with the same results; The LoadBehavior reg entry changes from 3 to 2, which I understand is just a general event indicating that the dll could not be loaded.
I have added a MessageBox.Show to the Connect method of my IDTExtensibility2 implementation, so that I will at least know that it has connected, but not even that is shown...
If anyone has any reasonable ideas why this may fail, PLEASE!!!!
Thanks in advance!!
/Fredrik
Deploying a shimmed Excel add-in
CharlesOC
Great you've figured it out!
Merry Christmas to you as well.
Farrukh Akhtar
Fredrik
It is interesting that you're running into this issue with VS2003. What is on your target Office machine - just .Net 1.1 or also .Net 2.0
If you were doing this in VS2005, then I'd say just look at KB908002, as this would sound like a known issue with VS2005 and .Net 2.0. But if you're running into this problem with a VS2003 shared add-in, then it's not entirely clear what could be going on -- the things that come to mind first are:
1) has your Office 2003 machine been patched with KB907417 It should be.
2) Do you have extensibility.dll on your target Office machine Typically, it should be there, if you're using IDTExtensibility2.
See if any of the above helps.
Martin
George Eckert
Hi Martin,
Thanks greatly for your comments!
Both machines are on .NET1.1, and VS03 is my dev environment.
This patch KB907417 is installed, it seems to have solved similar issues for many other unhappy chaps in my situation, so I tried it, but with no apparent effect.
Extensibility.dll is another one of those oddities... I am shipping it with my distribution, and if I understand things correctly, it should work if I have it installed in the app directory of my distribution. I also tried dropping it into my office11 directory where excel.exe has its working directory, but without success.
As a further note; I have also an RTD server shipping with this distribution, which I haven't paid much attention to in the deplyment so far. It is also shimmed, and when I ran into the wall with my Extensibility plugin, I tried to get the RTD working. As a matter of fact I just have to regsvr32 on my RTD shim and it works. Regsvr32-ing the add-in doesn't do anything at all though, but in my mind it disqualifies .net trust issues and such.
Cheers and thanks! Any further ideas are greatly appreciated!
/Fredrik
JimKennelly
Hi,
Problem is now finally resolved.
For reference, the issue was a conflict between two dll-s. When I create a new Shared Add-In project in VS03 it automatically adds a reference to Office.dll v.7.0.3300, which is distributed with VS. In actual fact I want to use Office.dll v.11.0.0.... so I added it (what I want to do is to add a menu item to the standard bar so this is needed). Problem however is that they impelment the same namespace Microsoft.Office.Core. VS tells me about this in a warning compile time, and that it has used one particular dll. When deployed, this caused a conflict and prohibited the add-in from loading.
Resolution: Remove the default referenced Office.dll from the project and add the newer version 11.0 instead.
Cheers, thanks and Merry Christmas!
/Fredrik