Why Doesn't My Shared Add-In for Office Show Up?
You've developed a Shared Add-In for Microsoft Office in .NET. Maybe you wanted to add a button to the toolbar, an item to a menu, or just write some code that takes advantage of the events available in an Add-In.
Everything works great on your development machine, but then you go to deploy it and it isn't showing up anywhere: no errors, no messages, nothing. Just nothing. What the heck?
I spent some time trying to figure out what in the world the was going on -- do the Primary Interop Redistributable Assemblies need to be installed on the client machines? Is it KB 907417 or KB 908002? Is it security on the registry? Something on the network? Do I need to create COM Shim to act as a unmanaged code proxy between Office and my managed C# code ?
The solution, it turns out, is simple: the dll "extensibility.dll" needed to be on the target machine. Put extensibility.dll in your application directory (next to your add-in dll) and you'll be all set.
You'd think this would happen automatically since the reference to Extensibility gets set up by default when you create a Shared Add-In project. However, it does not get included in the output or dependencies of the setup project:
What made this difficult to troubleshoot was the fact that this dll does not ship with anything you'd expect, like the office Primary Interop Assembly Runtime, and Visual Studio does not add this as a dependency when you create an Add-In project. So it seems that if you naively go about creating and deploying a Shared Add-In and deploying it in an Enterprise environment, chances are you'll run into a wall.
I finally tracked this down from a 2005 post on the MSDN forums:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=150571&SiteID=1
Everything works great on your development machine, but then you go to deploy it and it isn't showing up anywhere: no errors, no messages, nothing. Just nothing. What the heck?
I spent some time trying to figure out what in the world the was going on -- do the Primary Interop Redistributable Assemblies need to be installed on the client machines? Is it KB 907417 or KB 908002? Is it security on the registry? Something on the network? Do I need to create COM Shim to act as a unmanaged code proxy between Office and my managed C# code ?
The solution, it turns out, is simple: the dll "extensibility.dll" needed to be on the target machine. Put extensibility.dll in your application directory (next to your add-in dll) and you'll be all set.
You'd think this would happen automatically since the reference to Extensibility gets set up by default when you create a Shared Add-In project. However, it does not get included in the output or dependencies of the setup project:
What made this difficult to troubleshoot was the fact that this dll does not ship with anything you'd expect, like the office Primary Interop Assembly Runtime, and Visual Studio does not add this as a dependency when you create an Add-In project. So it seems that if you naively go about creating and deploying a Shared Add-In and deploying it in an Enterprise environment, chances are you'll run into a wall.
I finally tracked this down from a 2005 post on the MSDN forums:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=150571&SiteID=1