Hi,
I have developed a managed COM add-in and now I need to deply it on several PC's. I have been reading what I can find about deploying managed COM Add-ins. I am using VS 2005. I have figured out that I should proberly use shimming, but I have not been able to find a shim wizard for VS 2005 and .Net 2.0. What should I do in order to deploy my add-in in a correct and stable manner. I read a suggestion somewhere to use VS 2003 and then import the shim project into VS 2005. But I do not have VS 2003. So to me that is not a solution.
Any help would be great.
Thomas
How should I deploy my managed COM add-in
njm137
Thomas,
Because this forum is about using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office and not VS generally, I'll deal with the VSTO side of things. In VSTO 2005 we added the ability to create an Outlook 2003 managed code add-in. We take care of the shimming for you, and it is a very solid and reliable framework for you add-in. If you go outside of VSTO and create a Shared Add-in with your own custom shim, then you need to deploy your shim etc. on your own.
In VSTO 2005, we have a runtime, vstor.exe, that gets installed on each client where your add-in will run. You can deploy this runtime with your add-in dll and any dependencies.
Please read the following article to learn more about creating your installer:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp url=/library/en-us/odc_vsto2005_ta/html/OfficeVSTOWindowsInstallerOverview.asp
Also, please consult my uber list of Outlook programming resources, as it will serve you well. Bookmark it because I update it regularly:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant/archive/2005/12/07/vsto_outlook_resourcelist.aspx
John.
Michael-R
John,
thank you for your answer. Unfortunally the plug in I have developed is for Word so I guess that I will not be able to use the Outlook managed code add-in.
So I guess that I am back at the manually shim solution. How should I do this using VS2005. Is there no shimming project that will work with VS2005
Jose_Marcenaro
Rrstock
We have already received couple of request to update the shim for VSTO 2005 and we are about to release COM shim wizards for VSTO 2005 as an MSDN download. I will actually post an announcement on my blog when this wizard goes live. My blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/mshneer