Office Add-ins ANYONE?
Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:22 pm
I have been looking for an installer package to SIMPLIFY the amount of work required to deploy an Office Add-in. So far, not much joy as all of them are geared more to installing applications.
Installing a Microsoft add-in is very differnt than installing a simple application in that before I install ANYTHING I must first determine the version (or versions as there may be more than one) of Office on the client machine, and the version of Windows being used. Additionally I must install the correct interop assemblies for the specific Office version and the run times for Shared Add-in Support and/or Visual Studios Tools for Office. For what ever reason these run times are not available from IA and I see no way to add them.
Currently my project includes 14 interop assemblies, again I see no easy way to deploy them.
Finally, our addins make use of other MS technologies (example: Windows Media Encoder) and I see no way to define them as pre-requisits. (Different version of Windows require differnt versions of the encoder.)
I suppose I can go script happy and spend days building scripts, but to be honest I have done that in Visual Studios (VB) and at best its a kludge of a work around and is both time consuming and a royal pain. For the cost of this installer one would think it should simlify deployment, not force the developer to learn yet another @%_(@$&7 languge or scripting engine. sigh...
Has anyone used IA to deploy an Offie add-in and if so can you give me a brief idea how it was done?
Thanks
Installing a Microsoft add-in is very differnt than installing a simple application in that before I install ANYTHING I must first determine the version (or versions as there may be more than one) of Office on the client machine, and the version of Windows being used. Additionally I must install the correct interop assemblies for the specific Office version and the run times for Shared Add-in Support and/or Visual Studios Tools for Office. For what ever reason these run times are not available from IA and I see no way to add them.
Currently my project includes 14 interop assemblies, again I see no easy way to deploy them.
Finally, our addins make use of other MS technologies (example: Windows Media Encoder) and I see no way to define them as pre-requisits. (Different version of Windows require differnt versions of the encoder.)
I suppose I can go script happy and spend days building scripts, but to be honest I have done that in Visual Studios (VB) and at best its a kludge of a work around and is both time consuming and a royal pain. For the cost of this installer one would think it should simlify deployment, not force the developer to learn yet another @%_(@$&7 languge or scripting engine. sigh...
Has anyone used IA to deploy an Offie add-in and if so can you give me a brief idea how it was done?
Thanks