incorporating mailmerge code from vb.net 2008 for Office 2000

[Bruce Baker]

Hi

My VB.net app needs to cater for some of my clients who are still using
Office 2000 (some are using Office 2007 though)

We do some basic mail-merge stuff. Open a document, set a few bookmarks,
print it and then move onto the next client.

In VB6, I used to add a reference to msword.olb.

What do I need to do to get it to work - I've tried to add that as a
reference, and then Visual Studio does something magic with the 'interop'
stuff - and more importantly I get an exception when trying to load my
document


oApp.Documents.Open("c:\myDoc.doc", , True)

gives me an exception of


System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected
memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
at Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Documents.Open(Object& FileName, Object&
ConfirmConversions, Object& ReadOnly, Object& AddToRecentFiles, Object&
PasswordDocument, Object& PasswordTemplate, Object& Revert, Object&
WritePasswordDocument, Object& WritePasswordTemplate, Object& Format, Object&
Encoding, Object& Visible, Object& OpenAndRepair, Object& DocumentDirection,
Object& NoEncodingDialog, Object& XMLTransform)

Please help !

thanks
Bruce

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Broadly speaking I believe the situation is as follows:
- to communicate with Office Apps from .NET, you use IAs (Interop
Assemblies).
- there are different IAs for each different version of Office.
- some IAs known as Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) are provided by
Microsoft (only for Office XP and later)
- some features of later versions of Office may work with earlier versions
of the PIAs, but probably not the other way around
- other IAs you probably have to generate yourself
- you also have to distibute the IAs with any solution you develop. Nor do
I know whether there are any licensing issues on that front
- product of a /single/ .NET solution that targets all versions of Office
is, as far as I know, not supported - i.e. you will probably be better off
producing different versions of of the app for Word 2000 and later versions.

And that's really all I know - it may be worth searching msdn.microsoft.com,
the MS downloads site, and Google groups for further info.