Allow add-in installers to include the Office 2003 PIAs

D

David Thielen

Hi;

If Word 2003 is installed after .NET is installed, then the PIAs are set to
run on first use. This means the file Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll is
not in the GAC, but will be placed there when my add-in starts.

If Word 2003 is installed before .NET is installed, then the PIAs are set to
not install. This means when my add-in goes to run, it will fail.

There is no good way to handle this in my installer. If I set the existence
of
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll as a launch condition, then if the PIAs
are set to load on first use I will then force the user to reinstall Office,
select custome install, and install the PIAs - when all of that is
unnecessary as they will auto-install the first time my add-in runs.

If I don't have a launch condition and they installed Office before .NET,
then my add-in won't run.

This could be easily resolved if add-in installers could include the Office
2003 PIAs in their install. Without permission to include them, the best I
have come up with is a dialog box in the install that says:

"You may not have the Office 2003 PIAs installed yet. (We cannot tell for
sure as Microsoft can not give us a way to determine if they are set to load
on first use.) The next time you start Word, if AutoTag does not start, this
may be why. (Microsoft's wrapper for add-ins fails silently in this case so
we cannot tell you why the add-in failed.) If this happens, please re-install
Office 2003 and it will then install the three PIA files. (Microsoft will not
let us include these three files in our install to avoid this problem.) We
apologize for any inconvience this may cause. We have tried to make
installation as paibless as possible but we are limited in what we can do by
Microsoft."

which is not a good solution - but at least does not have the user blaming
us for a painful install process.
 

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