Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Development for multiple versions of Office

Peter's Blog — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:51:55 GMT

Andrew Whitechapel wrote a post in which he explains why is a no-no to have multiple versions of Office...

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Siddharth — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:36:29 GMT

Why we have kb's which helps us to do the same

How to run multiple versions of Office on one computer

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828956

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Peter Jausovec — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:55:15 GMT

One difference is that the kb deals with running multiple versions of Office and not development. But I agree with you it's weird :)

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:33:56 GMT

What's weird? My post explains in great detail why, although you can run multiple versions of Office on the same machine, we don't support _developing_ with multiple versions of Office. That was really the point of the post, after all. :-)

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Siddharth — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:15:24 GMT

Can't we have a kb article which says that *developing* with multiple versions of office is not supported?

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Peter Jausovec — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:22:35 GMT

Notice the smiley at the end :)

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 07:13:49 GMT

I noticed - thanks, Peter. :-)

Can you build one add-in for multiple versions of Office?

Andrew Whitechapel — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 07:18:44 GMT

This of course is the advantage of using the old "shared add-in" project types – you can build one add-in

What if the product specs call for supporting multiple versions of Office?

Steve Flaum — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:36:18 GMT

Well, that all makes sense. However, how about another blog explaining how to develop a VS app which must work with both Excel 2003 & Excel 2007? Given that the solution isn't having both versions of Excel on the development box, what IS the solution?

That's what I'm faced with. I do most of the development & testing myself. I thought I'd solved the problem by referencing the old PIAs by path, but now see that isn't true. Could I install one version directly on my computer and another version, for testing, in Virtual PC, also on that computer?

Thanks.

Developing for 2 versions of Office

Steve Flaum — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:46:03 GMT

Further to my last post, installing only Excel 2003 on my computer isn't the answer. The reason for my question is that a version of my program which worked with Excel 2003 crashed 2007. This results from an Excel 2007 defect, for which Microsoft Tech Support suggested a workaround. I'm now trying to test my code with the workaround on both versions of Excel.

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Denis Pitcher — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:32:06 GMT

I'm annoyed with this scenario. While I do understand the reasoning behind why the two don't work alongside each other, it is a bit rediculus to end up burning two licenses of windows and two licenses of visual studio just so you can test your code on 2007 while still being able to support 2003 for your users.

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Bill Seddon — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:25:18 GMT

<<and I can't think of a good reason>>

For me this says everything about VSTO. It's beyond belief that its difficult for someone on the VSTO team to imagine the need to run multiple versions of Office on a machine.

It's a choice to implement VSTO this way and IMHO a poor one.

Aggregating blogs in a blog

Visual Studio 2008: Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:19:22 GMT

There are many resources to learn about Visual Studio Tools for Office, and they are scattered through

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:03:01 GMT

Bill - thanks for your comment. Perhaps you could elaborate.

I didn't say I couldn't imagine the need - I can imagine all kinds of scenarios - but that doesn't necessarily make them good reasons.

I'm happy to be corrected if this is wrong - and I'm keen to understand any valid scenario that requires running multiple versions of the same application.

The typical case I've experienced is where the customer has an add-in or other extension which only works with version N and another extension which only works with version N+1. However, I don't consider this a "good" reason - the better approach would be to upgrade the old extension so that it works with version N+1 - wouldn't you agree?

Also, as I explained in my post, there are several good reasons why it is a bad idea to develop with multiple versions of Office on the same machine. Most of these are not specific to VSTO at all, they're basic COM limitations.

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Charles Wang — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:16:41 GMT

Andrew--

Say we develop our solution on the machine that only has Office 2003 but our customers' desktops may have both Excel 2003 and 2007. We also managed to properly launch Excel 2003 with our add-in (VBA based, not VSTO-based).

In this case, does our application still reference to 2007 PIA? Even so, I believe it shouldn't be a problem assuming 2007 OM should be a superset of 2003 OM?

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:08:25 GMT

Charles - I'm not clear on your situation. You say you have a VBA add-in, yet you ask about PIAs. VBA add-ins do not use PIAs. Only managed code solutions use PIAs.

If you have a managed code solution running in Office 2003, yet the machine also has Office 2007 installed, then it is likely that the solution will run with the 2007 PIAs - simply because it is likely that the 2007 PIAs were registered last. However, it could be that you installed (or repaired) the 2003 PIAs last, in which case all managed Office solutions will be using the 2003 PIAs (which therefore means that any such solutions that target functionality that is only available in 2007 will be broken).

Automatic project conversion / migration (Harry Miller)

Visual Studio 2008: Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:47:19 GMT

By default, Visual Studio automatically converts Office 2003 projects into Office 2007 projects when

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Ali Razvi — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:08:14 GMT

I can understand timelines and need to cut on functionality in order to release products. But release new VSTO version so often along with office solutions you are leaving us developers behind. I can just imagine how many virtual dev boxes I need for the VSTO stuff in just a year or two!

Please understand the success for VSTO has to be the ease to use and maintain!

Regards,

Ali

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 02:12:02 GMT

Ali - thanks for your comments. We feel it is important to release new versions of the product whenever there are significant new features in either Office or the .NET Framework. We certainly get lots of feedback from developers telling us they need to take advantage of these new features, and asking us to provide new versions of the Visual Studio tools to support this kind of development. I'm sure you agree that developers need to keep up to date with the latest evolution of any platform that they target.

VSTO学习资料: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

hit41 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:51:39 GMT

BelowmateriaisfromAndrewWhitechapel'sblog,whichisforVisualStudio,OfficeandotherNonsen...

VSTO学习资料：Can you build one add-in for multiple versions of Office?

hit41 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:52:49 GMT

This of course is the advantage of using the old

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

sancreations — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:29:06 GMT

I am unsure why this blog is still here with old comments, somehow my last team always worked with both the Office versions on their box(es) 2003 and 2007 and developed excel add-ins using VS2008.

Today I am on a new box and with no touch with old team, am wondering why I am unable to do it again..

Can you please update this blog if there has been any KB released in past or any fix which has come in...

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:51:07 GMT

sancreations - nothing has changed. Developing with multiple versions of Office on the same machine is still not supported, for all the reasons I gave in my post. There is no "fix" possible - the fundamental issue is the nature of COM registration, which will not change. Note: it is _possible_ to develop with multiple Office versions on the same machine, with some restrictions, but it is _not supported_.

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Thomas Barnekow — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:11:34 GMT

Andrew,

let me provide some background before asking my questions.

We are developing a PowerPoint add-in using VS2008. The original version supports Office 2003. Due to the many differences between PowerPoint 2007 and 2003, we need to do significant development and testing to make it work with Office 2007 and 2003 at the same time. Therefore, we have Office 2003 and 2007 on the dev machines. And by the way, some of our customers are also using multiple Office versions at the same time (literally), e.g., because they produce presentations for multiple customers with different Office versions.

Now to my questions:

(1) We are referencing the PIAs by path and they are also installed on the target machines. Does that still mean we'll not use the PIAs we explicitly distributed in case the client has a different Office version?

(2) Is it not possible to create a single add-in that works with both 2007 and 2003 if we want/need to use some of the 2007-only or changed functionality (e.g., color schemes)? We think about using the 2007 PIA "with care" ;-)

(3) What would be the suggested approach in our case, considering that we need to be able to debug both 2003 and 2007?

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:34:20 GMT

Thomas,

(1) If you reference the PIAs by path, and if that same path is valid on the target machines, then that's the path that will get used at runtime, regardless of the Office version installed. An alternative is to avoid using the PIAs (see below).

(2) It is possible to create a single add-in that works with both 2007 and 2003. See here for more details:

http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2007/06/15/can-you-build-one-add-in-for-multiple-versions-of-office.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2008/06/03/add-ins-for-multiple-office-versions-without-pias.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2008/06/24/add-ins-for-multiple-office-versions-without-pias-pt2-or-vtblgap.aspx

(3) With the caveats I mentioned in this post and the others I've quoted above, you could build an add-in for multiple versions, and debug it on one machine - but you'd obviously need to be careful to allow for all the things that could go wrong (as mentioned in the blog posts).

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

Robson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:29:12 GMT

Hi Andrew,

Nice post, help a lot. Now, what I'm having here is this:

1) Projects: Excel 2003 AddIn and a Setup project to configure security.

2) DEV Machine: Office 2003, VS 2008 SP1. The add-in works fine when runs the project. Add-In installs correctly, and runs correctly after instaled.

3) BUILD Machine: Office 2007, VS 2008 SP1, TFS. We open the projects, do not convert to uses 2007 PIAs (by changing options in VS2008). The project build. We can install in the dev machine, but the add-in do not works in Excel 2003.

Is there any other configuration to make this work, or we have to build in the machine with Office 2003 ?!

Tks.

re: Why is VS development not supported with multiple versions of Office?

andreww — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:30:32 GMT

Robson - I'm not sure I understand your problem. You say at (3) that you're opening the projects but NOT changing the PIA references? So the project you're building still references the 2003 PIAs, right? And you've got the 2003 PIAs on the build machine? And you're referencing them by path? If the answer to all of these is 'yes', then the fact that you have Office 2007 itself on the build machine should make no difference at all, and you're still building a pure 2003 project with entirely 2003 references.

So, if it doesn't work, I have to assume that you're changing the PIA references...?