Setting up development machine for 2000 & 2002 COM dev.

[Joe Smith]

I've been building an Outlook COM object and found that the only way to get it to run on Office 2000 & 2002 was to have Office 2000 on the devlopment machine. Is there anyway to have Office 2002 on the development machine but still make a COM object that can run on Office 2000 (Outlook)

 

[Tom Winter]

I've been building an Outlook COM object and found that the only way to

get it to run on Office 2000 & 2002 was to have Office 2000 on the
devlopment machine. Is there anyway to have Office 2002 on the development
machine but still make a COM object that can run on Office 2000 (Outlook)?

--------------------------

The way you probably want it, no. You can only have one version of Outlook
installed on your machine. And for Office development, you want the OLDEST
version you are going to support. See this article:

INFO: Writing Automation Clients for Multiple Office Versions
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;244167

Your other main options would be to use late binding throughout (Dim As
Object, etc.).

You might also be able to use Virtual PC to run multiple versions of
Outlook. (It come with some MSDN subscriptions I believe, or go to
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/) I'm not really familiar with
it. Some others might be able to comment on it.

 

[Andrew Cushen]

I would second what Tom said, and also point out that your
App is going to take a performance hit if you go the Late
Binding route. The generally accepted method, as Tom said,
is to develop on a PC with the earliest version of Outlook
you want to support.

Virtual PC will certainly work; you will still need to
have Outlook 2000 installed within the virtual machine you
are doing the development from. In other words, if you go
the Virtual PC route, you can have Outlook 2002 on your
PC, but must install Outlook 2000 and VB/Visual Studio
(whichever you're using) installed into a Virtual Machine,
& do your development in that Virtual Machine.
My guess is, this is not what you're looking for - you
will see slower performance in the Virtual Machine unless
you've really got a monster of a PC with tons of RAM.


-Andrew
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-----Original Message-----
I've been building an Outlook COM object and found that

the only way to get it to run on Office 2000 & 2002 was to
have Office 2000 on the devlopment machine. Is there
anyway to have Office 2002 on the development machine but
still make a COM object that can run on Office 2000
(Outlook)?