PIA question

[Daniel B. Sigurgeirsson]

Hi,

I'm having a little bit of a trouble in figuring out what is the best (and
most correct) way of managing/deploying my Word/Excel/Outlook addin. It is
written in C# but does not use VSTO. Ideally, it should be usable in Office
2003, Office 2007 and even Office XP (even though that may not be absolutely
necessary). I'm developing against the 2003 PIA's.

Just a little background about my app: it simply adds two menu items to the
"File" menu, which basically allow the user to open files from a custom
repository, and to save files to that same repository. My application should
be usable in any of these three applications, even if one of them isn't
installed. Therefore, I've factored my plugin into different modules; one
main module which contains the main logic, and then one module for each app
type (Word, Excel, Outlook). Then the appropriate module is loaded at
startup, based on the type of the Office application which is running.

And then to my problem. I'm not sure what is the best way to ensure that the
proper PIA's are installed. When I created the C# project my plugin is
created with, an install project was created as well. Is it possible for me
to include conditional logic in that install project, to make it install the
proper PIA based on which version the user is running? One KB article I read
at MSDN (I can't remember the URL) said that the 2003 PIA's should not be
distributed with 3rd party applications, yet the 2003 PIA install is
available? Do I need to compile my app with separate references, expecially
if I want to target OfficeXP as well as 2003? And what about Office 2007? I
would also like my app to be usable in that version, so I would guess that I
also must compile against the 2007 PIA's if I want to use functionality from
that version of Office (such as the ribbon) right? So, if I'm not mistaken,
then I need three different versions of my main module, and then three
different versions of my app-specific modules *each*, which amounts to twelve
different projects/modules. Is this correct, or am I completely
misunderstanding this?

Any help whatsoever would be very much appreciated. I've been reading alot
about this stuff (blog posts, MSDN articles, forum posts, etc.), but haven't
found any good resource which summarizes all this. So as I said, if someone
could explain this and hopefully direct me in the correct direction, then I
would be extremely grateful!

Regards,
Daníel

 

[David Thielen]

Yes you want to include the Word 2003 & 2007 PIAs and optionally install them
if needed. And yes you can redistribute them. We went through a ton of effort
on this to find that they are redistributable and that the only safe approach
is to include them in your installer.

Make sure you install them to the GAC.

--
thanks - dave
david_at_windward_dot_net
http://www.windwardreports.com

Cubicle Wars - http://www.windwardreports.com/film.htm

 

[David Thielen]

Also, we create 4 projects (Word 2000/2/3/7) but they all use the same code
and just build against the different PIAs. With that said, we have found any
version works fine on later versions of Word.

--
thanks - dave
david_at_windward_dot_net
http://www.windwardreports.com

Cubicle Wars - http://www.windwardreports.com/film.htm

 

[Andrei Smolin [Add-in Express]]

Hi Daniel,

You can't switch to using other PIAs dynamically. You can only use those
PIAs which you referred to at the development time. So I would advise you to
use PIAs for Office XP and distribute them with the add-in. In this case the
add-in will support Office 2002 - 2007 and it will not depend on the PIAs
installed (or not installed) on the target PC.

Regards from Belarus,

Andrei Smolin
Add-in Express Team Leader
www.add-in-express.com