I created an xll add-in which contains some user defined functions for excel using excel dna, now i want to deploy this add-in on the customer's pc, for that i would like to create an installer using installshield. is this possible to be done with installshield?
Have you an idea or any suggestion how to create an installer for my xll addin please ?
Many thanks
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I am working on a VSTO addin
I would like how to do that when the addin is going to be installed it's going to install a word template in the template folder together.
It seems like you need to create a custom action for your add-in installer where you could do the required actions programmatically while the add-in is installed.
There are two main ways deploying Office add-ins:
Deploy an Office solution by using Windows Installer
Deploy an Office solution by using ClickOnce
The windows installer (MSI) provides all the necessary tools for that.
I have a question if there is any way how to install Office.js Excel add-in from Network share via powershell.
I wasn't able to find any information.
I have created a WIX Install MSI file for my Office Outlook Plugin. Everything runs fine however when i uninstall it through add/remove programs everything is removed except for the Plugin in Outlook. It runs but gives errors because the other components are now missing. How can I get it to remove it without going to Outlook and removing the plugin manually?
I have added the "RemoveFolder" tag in the XML which has no effect.
I'm guessing that you are doing some kind of active setup trick to do HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry propogation. I'd suggest not doing this and instead register the extension in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. This way when the uninstall runs it can access all of the components that need to be removed. There are gotchas in terms of different patch versions of different versions of office and how they behave in terms of supporting per-machine registration of AddIns. Details can be found in blog articles that I've written over the years titled VSTO lessons learned.
I have a requirement to create an installer for an Outlook 2003 add-in that was created with VSTO.
We currently are using Wix for our installers as they play nice with MSBuild and I need to use it to create the installer for the outlook add-in.
I have no experience with outlook add-ins and am unsure exactly what is involved and how to go about creating the installer.
Can anyone share any experience/tips/examples that would help me please?
Thanks in advance,
B
I found this Microsoft article on VSTO add-ins deployment to be an absolute life-saver; I don't know about Wix, though. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332052.aspx
I've not done this in WiX but I have done it in InstallShield. Below with my notes from that time:
http://blog.deploymentengineering.com/search?q=vsto
One problem you will have is that WiX doesn't have a bootstrapper so you will have to find a way to chain the .NET Framework and VSTO redist ( also possibly the Office 2003 PIAs; you didn't say which version of VSTO you are using ) with your installer unless you choose to take the route that merely gates the install if those aren't found.
I recall using a DTF custom action to publish a certificate but I can't recall if that was needed for Office 2003 or only for Office 2007.
Does Office 2007 PIA also require Office 2007 to be installed?
Can I deploy Office 2007 PIA with VSTO 3.0 (without having Office 2007 installed)?
EDIT: I have a windows application that generates MS Word files. I have added the Office 2007 PIA as custom pre-requisite in the setup, but Office 2007 PIA needs MS Office 2007 to be installed.
I just wanted to know that if VSTO does not require Office Installation, then maybe i can convert my application to VSTO.
In order to use VSTO you must have Office Installed. The VSTO PIA's only provide a shim between .NET and the COM interfaces that Office exposes. So the PIA's can do nothing w/o Office.
note: you can generate docx (word 2007) files without office.
What do you want to do with the Primary Interop Assemblies exactly? I think you need to clarify your question a bit.
If you plan on making any method calls to the Microsoft Office PIA DLLs without Office installed you can expect your code to blow up with a COMException when you run it since Office isn't there to inter-operate with.
If what you want to do is create Word documents without MS Word being installed then your best option is to use one of the available programs to do this. This is usually how Word/Excel documents are created on a web server for instance.
To generate MS Word documents we've used both Syncfusion DocIO (and XlsIO for Excel) and OfficeWriter and they have been much easier and literally 5 to 30 times faster in document generation than MS Word (depending on the complexity of the document). However, these tools are not free. I suppose it's theoretically possible to generate docx files manually (as hinted by Tracker1) but that would be a lot of work unless there are free libraries to assist in doing that.