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

The PODA Blog - News, views and articles from our membership » Creating and Deploying Managed COM Add-ins with VSTO 2005 SE ??? Part II

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:30:25 GMT

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

mclabman — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:50:31 GMT

Installing http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&DisplayLang=en helps resolve some missing reference problems.

What do you think about this way?

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

andreww — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:54:10 GMT

mclabman - installing the compatibility pack really just installs the file converters. It doesn't install PIAs. So it doesn't change the PIA situation at all.

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

taowen — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:38:34 GMT

I build adapter10, adapter11 and adapter12 for my add-in for powerpoint. what I do is create my own interfaces for shapes and slides. then I write the adapter code, but referenced by three projects. I add different version of PIA to those projects. When loading up on connection, I use reflection to load assembly and create the corresponding adapter. I have no problem so far, and I do think shared add-in is more convenient to use compared with VSTO and Add-in Express.

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

MikeI — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:46:45 GMT

Hi Andrew,

You wrote:

"My advice is to build 2 separate add-ins, one for 2003 (which will continue to run in 2007 and later)..."

From this, I infer that running a shimmed COM add-in (and/or a shimmed Automation add-in) which is compiled against the Office 2003 PIAs is supported with Excel 2007. Is that correct? Or should it really be rebuilt using references to the Office 12 PIAs before deployment with Excel 2007?

I have such an add-in (COM add-in and Automation add-in (both shimmed) and a group of C# COM objects which are exposed for use in VBA). This all appears to work fine when deployed on a PC with Excel 2007, where it obviously loads the Office 2007 PIAs rather than the Office 2003 PIAs against which it was built. I'd just like to know whether this is supported.

I'm investigating developing a new VSTO 2005 SE add-in to make use of the ribbon such that I'd no longer add to the menus as the Excel 2003 COM Add-in currently does. But I've run into some problems getting this VSTO add-in to load the Automation add-in for me (which is what the COM add-in does). I've also had some issues with exposing the C# COM objects to VBA from the VSTO add-in. Now all these issues may be soluble, but since my existing Excel 2003 add-ins appear to work fine, I have been thinking about writing a VSTO 2005 SE add-in which would provide the ribbon features I need and deploying the existing Excel 2003 add-ins along side it (with conditional code to prevent additions to the menu structure when called from Excel 2007).

Thanks,

Mike

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

MikeI — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:35:02 GMT

It appears that my question above is largely answered by your previous blog entry: http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2007/06/08/why-is-vs-development-not-supported-with-multiple-versions-of-office.aspx

I'd still be interested to hear your thoughts on whether it's a good idea to make use of the ribbon by writing a new VSTO 2005 SE add-in which then calls into my existing COM add-in (for dialogs; the VBA COM objects; etc.)and my existing Automation add-in (for UDFs). Or, should I be chasing down the issues that have so far prevented me from loading my Automation Add-in from the VSTO 2005 SE add-in.

Thanks,

Mike

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

Mujeeb — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:19:15 GMT

I created a shared add-in for Outlook. I want it make workable in both 2003 and 2007. Object library 12.0 is not supporting outlook 2003. so I removed object library

12.0 and do with libray 11.0. But object library 11.0 not support IRibbonExtensibility. So i want to create seprate dll for IRibbonExtensibility, and it add to my project. Can you help me for creating IRibbonExtensibility dll in c#

Developing an add-in for multiple versions of Office

Visual Studio 2008: Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:07:10 GMT

Theoretically, you can develop an add-in for multiple versions of Microsoft Office by catering to the

Developing an add-in for multiple versions of Office

Andrew Coates ::: MSFT — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:22:05 GMT

One of the common questions I get asked when I do sessions on VSTO / OBA development is "how can

Add-ins for Multiple Office Versions without PIAs

Andrew Whitechapel — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:48:26 GMT

In a previous post , I discussed how you could build an add-in for multiple versions of Office, and explained

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

wasim — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:52:46 GMT

Hi Andrew can u tell me that can i create add in Outlook2002 using Vs2005 VSTO

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

andreww — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:28:06 GMT

wasim - VSTO does not support add-ins for versions of Office prior to 2003. If you want to build an add-in for Outlook 2002, you should use the shared add-in projects, as described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa155703.aspx.

Version-Specific UI in Add-ins

Andrew Whitechapel — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:42:09 GMT

Continuing on from my earlier posts on building add-ins for multiple versions of Office , avoiding the

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

hit41 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:52:11 GMT

Originurl:http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2007/06/15/can-you-build-one-add-in-for-multiple-v...

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

hit41 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:52:41 GMT

This of course is the advantage of using the old

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

Rajeev — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:55:41 GMT

Developed an office 2003 automation application in a machine with office 2003. It works well in a client machine with just office 2003. But fails in a client machine with Office 2003 with office 2007 compatibility pack installed. Any pointers to resolve this issue.

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

andreww — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:03:40 GMT

Ranjeev - the compatibility pack does not change the Office 2003 object model, so there should be no differences. You don't say anything specific about what is actually failing - if it is failing at some OM call, you need to debug into your code to see what the problem is. If it is failing to instantiate the Office application objects, then there might be a registration problem. In any case, you need to provide more information.

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

Rajeev — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:50:13 GMT

Andreww. Thanks fo your valuable reply. The issues was it was not able find the Microsoft Office dlls. The Exception it thrown was

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

File name: 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'

This was temperory fixed by doing copy local true for the assemblies this is against the microsoft recommendations for a Shared library for GAC. Please advise on this.

Other than this issue there is one more issue where the application is not working in a highly secured environment. I think this is a security related issue.

Can you please check the following thread started by me regarding this issue.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/ea864a09-2fb9-4945-8b61-03fa06aff512

Thanks,

-Rajeev

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

andreww — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:45:20 GMT

Rajeev - as Tim points out in that forum thread, and as I've pointed out in the referenced blog posts, developing VSTO add-ins explicitly for multiple versions of Office is not supported and not recommended. As you can see, and as explained in the posts, you will hit a number of version-conflict problems. The VSTO model is strictly versioned.

That said, if you build for the lowest common denominator, the add-in should continue to work unchanged in later versions of Office - this is also part of the VSTO model.

The workarounds I describe in my posts are just that - workarounds. They are not supported mechanisms, and are probably only useful for advanced developers who are willing to accept the lack of support.

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

Rajeev — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:09:42 GMT

Thanks for your inputs and your time. It really helped to understand much about the VSTO model and

the way it works.

Thanks,

Rajeev

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

Mike McMack — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:31:47 GMT

Ohhh you HAD to tell me this now!! We have an add-in, developed years ago for 2003. Its been running on 2007, until something caused it to "blurf" and not load on one of the product QA's machine (which has both office 2003 and office 2007 installed).

So, now you're telling us we have to build two versions, one for 2003 and one for 2007? Akk, pain, misery... And our target customers have a wide range of MS Office versions installed. Imagine telling a world wide bank "Excuse me, but you MUST upgrade all 111,452 desktops, all over the world, to use the same version of office..."

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

andreww — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:43:04 GMT

Mike - the technique described in this post is for the case where you want to take advantage of _different_ features available in multiple versions of Office.

If all you want to do is build an add-in for one version, and have that add-in continue to work for later versions - then, you don't have to do anything. Office takes great pains to maintain backwards compatibility, so an add-in built for Office 2003 should just continue to work the same way as always in Office 2007 and later. This has always been the case, since COM add-ins were first introduced in Office 2000.

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

Mike McMack — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:43:25 GMT

Dear Andrew,

Thanks for a great post. Regarding:

"So, do you want to keep building 2003 add-ins, even though you're targeting Office 2007? It seems to me, you really want to move on. Office has moved on – 2007 introduced major changes from previous versions. VSTO has also moved on."

It's not our choice. Some large organizations don't update office in a predictable way, so its unfortunately up to development to figure out how to make our product work with multiple versions of office, and have contingency plans in place so that their IT deployment folks don't blow a gasket when they can't install a version.

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

andreww — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:00:06 GMT

Mike - I understand that many organizations cannot move on to the latest version in the short term. My point is that in this scenario, you don't have to do anything. Your 2003 add-ins should just work in 2007.

You would only want to move on to building 2007 add-ins if your customers moved to 2007 AND if you want to take advantage of new features in 2007.

You only have the problem of targeting multiple versions if your customer has multiple versions deployed AND your add-in needs to work in multiple versions AND you need to do different things depending on which version you're running in. In this scenario, you're targeting the lowest common denominator, but at the same time building in forward compatibility. Fortunately, this is not a common scenario.

Also, just to clarify, this affects all technologies - it doesn't matter if you're using VSTO or not.

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

Mike McMack — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:29:26 GMT

Thanks Andrew. Great article as usual.

I just wanted to clarify one thing: If the add-in is developed/built on a build machine with Office 2003 PIA's, does that mean that Office 2003 PIA's need to be installed on the deployment machine, even if the customer is using Office 2007?

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

andreww — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:36:45 GMT

Mike - if you're building on a machine with Office 2003, I assume you're only using 2003 features. Later versions of Office are generally supersets - that is they don't generally remove features, but simply add more features. So any 2003 features should all still be present and correct in 2007. Which means, you don't need the 2003 PIAs on the 2007 machine, as the 2007 PIAs should be a superset of the 2003 PIAs.

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

Mike McMack — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:27:16 GMT

Hi Andrew,

As luck would have it, the add-in stopped loading in Excel 2007 on one machine. We didn't make any changes to the add_in, its still an office 2003 COM addin (built in C# with Dev Studio 2008 + SP1) it loads in Excel 2003 on that same machine. We've tried everythying, uninstalling/reinstalled the add-in, excel 2007, the PIA's. When Excel starts, the COM add-in is listed in the Excel configuration tab, but its listed as disabled. We check the checkbox, restart, it doesnt load and its still disabled. We checked the loadBehavior registry key, its correct, set to 3, never changes. We checked the trust center, nothing bad there. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Mike

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

andreww — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:38:26 GMT

Mike - it sounds like the add-in is hard-disabled. The list of hard-disabled add-ins is app-specific, version-specific and user-specific. For example, the list for Excel 2007 is kept in the registry here: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Resiliency\DisabledItems].

To check/re-enable a hard-disabled add-in, go to the Trust Center, Add-ins, and drop down the Manage listbox to find the Disabled items.

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

Mike McMack — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:36:20 GMT

Andrew,

Thanks, that did it!

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

Anurag Aggarwal — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:13:35 GMT

Is it possible to install seperate add-ins dlls , one for 2003 and another for 2007 on a a machine where only office 2003 is available so as when user upgrade to office 2007 it picks up add-in related to 2007?

Thanks

Anurag

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

andreww — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:06:00 GMT

Anurag - not, Office does not support versioned add-in installs. Office will pick up all registered add-ins, regardless of version.