Visual Studio Shared Add-In won’t load
There seems to be a lot of issues when dealing with writing Office Add-ins. Forums are scoured with posts regarding an add-in that works fine on one PC but fails to load on another. The most common reason is simply described as "a run time error" by the COM add-in’s dialog. Thank Microsoft for the uber-description on that one. After a lot of time and debugging, I believe I have finally tracked down a solution to these problems. The problem is a bug in Visual Studio 2005 (not sure about 2008) that omits some prerequisites. Read on for the solution.
Additional details as well as a link to download an update for Visual Studio 2005 to address the bug can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;908002. Once installed, you must select Shared Add-in Support Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (KB908002) from the prerequisites of your setup project. This will create a KB908002 folder with the project output. Unfortunately, there is no prompt if the update is not installed, and to make things better, none of the updates are run by the installer. So to get the add-in working, you must run all 3 updates from the KB908002 folder on the target machine. After completing the update, my add-in loaded without failure on every machine tested.
Stay tuned for a full blown guide to writing Office Add-Ins.
