Office 2003 Add-In: Compatibility with Office XP, 97 etc

[Shannon Richards]

Hello All: I am building a COM add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 using
..Net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.
Since I have Office 2003 installed on my development machine, I am
referencing the Office 11.0 libraries.

I would like this add in to work with previous versions of PowerPoint as
well...Is there any way to develop the add-in so that it will work with
previous versions of PowerPoint???

My fear is that I will have to compile the add-in against the specific
version of the Office libraries to achieve this backward compatibility...

Any advise will be greatly appreciated...

- Shannon

 

[XL-Dennis]

Shannon,

This seems to be a 'classic' issue, i e have access to the latest version
but need to develope against the oldest version. Office 97 does not support
COM Add-in so the earliest version to target is 2000.

You can always use late binding but that's not the recommend approach so if
You want to go with early binding then You need to create Your own Type
library. The following article shows how to do it for Excel but it can be
applied for other tools in the Office suite as well.

Achieving Backward Compatibility with .NET Interop: Excel as Case Study
http://www.devcity.net/PrintArticle.aspx?ArticleID=163

---------------
With kind regards,
Dennis
Weekly Blog .NET & Excel: http://xldennis.wordpress.com/
My English site: http://www.excelkb.com/default.aspx
My Swedish site: http://www.xldennis.com/

 

[Shannon Richards]

Dennis: Thank you once again for the great feedback!!!

I think I'll try the suggested option of building for the lowest common
denominator.

- Shannon

 

[XL-Dennis]

Shannon - You're welcome and please let me know the outcome of it.

---------------
With kind regards,
Dennis
Weekly Blog .NET & Excel: http://xldennis.wordpress.com/
My English site: http://www.excelkb.com/default.aspx
My Swedish site: http://www.xldennis.com/