Demand-Loading VSTO Add-ins
In an earlier post, I talked about how you could delay (or prevent) the loading of managed code using a native add-in. In that post I also listed the standard LoadBehavior settings, and I was assuming that everyone knows how these apply, but I got a couple of follow-up questions that prompted me to clarify the normal (LoadBehavior-based) demand-loading mechanism, and how it applies to VSTO add-ins.
It’s pretty simple: you can set up any Office COM add-in (native, managed, VSTO) for demand-loading in a standard way, that is by setting the LoadBehavior in the registry to 0x10 (16 dec). For versions of Office prior to 2007 (and for those Office apps that don’t yet support the Ribbon), the typical pattern is to create some custom CommandBar control in your add-in at startup. Office will load the add-in the first time it boots after the add-in is registered, call your add-in code to set up the custom UI, and cache this information so that when the user clicks the control, this will load the add-in.
In the case of add-ins that implement custom Ribbons, the behavior is essentially the same: Office will load the add-in the first time it boots after the add-in is registered, call GetCustomUI and cache the ribbon XML. Then, Office resets the LoadBehavior value to 8. Subsequently, when the user clicks one of the ribbon controls, this will load the add-in and set LoadBehavior to 9. This works with both a low-level IRibbonExtensibility implementation and with the VSTO designer-generated ribbon wrappers.
If you want to set LoadBehavior in your project for testing during development, you could create a regedit script, eg:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\MyAddIn]
"Description"="MyAddIn"
"FriendlyName"="MyAddIn"
"LoadBehavior"=dword:00000010
"Manifest"="c:\\Temp\\MyAddIn\\bin\\Debug\\MyAddIn.vsto|vstolocal"
...and then add this to the project properties as a post-build step:
regedit /s "$(SolutionDir)$(SolutionName).reg"
When it comes time to deploy the solution, if you’re using a setup project, you’ll have to set the LoadBehavior by setting the value in the registry editor in your setup project.
If you’re using ClickOnce publishing, you’ll need to edit the loadBehavior attribute value manually in the application manifest (and then re-sign the manifest).
That’s it. There’s nothing else you need to do. You create your custom Ribbon either using a low-level implementation or using the VSTO designer wrappers – all in the normal way.
