Andrew May's WebLog

The VB Tutorials don't build. I get errors finding the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Visio assebly.

Any clues?

M

Hey Matthew,
Well, here’s what I would check right off the bat: make sure that the Visio PIAs are actually installed on your machine.
First, double check that you're using Visual Studio 2003 (version 7.1) and the .Net Framework 1.1. If you installed these applications after you installed Visio, then the Visio PIAs would not have been installed. (If Visual Studio or the .NET Framework were already present on your machine when you installed Visio, then the Visio PIAs should have been installed by default.)
Next, try having Visio explicitly install the PIAs. From the Start menu, click Settings, click Control Panel, then Add or Remove Programs. In the program list, select Microsoft Office Visio 2003, and click the Change button. Click Add or Remove Features, and then click Next. Expand the Microsoft Office Visio icon and select .NET Programmability Support, and then click Update. You may want to try uninstalling this and then reinstalling to force it to install.
One way to check to see if the PIAs are installed is to navigate to your windows directory in explorer, e.g.
c:\windows\assembly
c:\winnt\assembly\
and see if you see the Visio PIAs for Visio version 11 in the list of assemblies. There are three PIAs for Visio. The primary one is Microsoft.Office.Interop.Visio.
Hopefully, this helps. Let me know how it goes.
If that’s not the issue, there have been some emails on Visio newsgroups recently that seem to indicate that installing one of the recent office updates impacts the Visio PIA and its registration in the GAC. I haven’t had time to chase this down, however, so if that’s the case here, your best bet is going directly to the newsgroups themselves for info.