I’m going to diverge a bit off the VSTO path and talk about a more generic ClickOnce story. If you have used ClickOnce in VS 2008 or VS 2005 you may be somewhat familiar with partial trust scenarios and the idea of permission sets. If you do not care about partial trust but instead live in the world...

It's been a while, I'm not really interested in going to the details of why at the moment, lets dig right into the topic. Generally I focus on more of the technical aspects of what you can do without really talking much about some of the other considerations that should go into make your deployment design...

I'm not going to go into detail about everything in the VS 2008 SP1 package, but what I would like to point out some key deployment features that were added and why you would want to consider installing even if you have a large user base using a base VS 2008 customization.  In this discussion I...

In my last post I talked about the first steps to building my Customer Prerequisite.  In it, I built an MSI that would display a message box during the install phase. Here is what Setup1looks like when you run it: It's nothing too ingenious but it gets the job done. So...here we are with an MSI...

In January I talked about using Custom Prerequisites to add a little more specialization to the VSTO ClickOnce experience.  I didn't go too much in depth into this and I've since seen a few comments crop up about them in some of the VSTO community spaces I watch.  So I'm going to go through...

For the past couple of months I have been avoiding talking too much on this blog about about creating "Windows Installer" deployments of VSTO.  I've been avoiding it because we've been working on writing a well-formed paper on how to do this and I wanted to wait for it to come out. ...

Last week I had the pleasure of getting some very interesting feedback from some of the Microsoft Office development audience (people who develop against office through VSTO/VSTA/VBA/Shared Add-ins/etc ).  If you were at said event and are now reading here because of it, I welcome you and hope you...

  Last Week I talked about user-generated updates and the Click-Once Deployment Management API's.  Based on some internal feedback and a large degree of personal interest, I'm going to come right back around to the same topic, but with a cleaner solution that does the whole kit and caboodle...

Before I go any further in this post I'm going to put a huge disclaimer:  You should be warned what I'm about to cover has not been fully tested, is clearly not supported or recommended and may have significant impact on your application's ability to work.  Additionally there is no guarantee...

From time to time I will come across (via various channels) a question of why VSTO 3.0 requires the 3.5 framework. Usually these questions are prefaced or suffixed with a “in VSTO 2005 SE I was able to use 2.0, why are you making me use 3.5 now?” Just to clarify, when I talk about VSTO 3.0 I mean...

Memory is king and he who remembers the most rules will rule the most (not a real quote but it sounds interesting). Anyway, it is very easy to create "widget" apps with VSTO that "do" something, but often where the really interesting projects come into play is when the app can "do" something and then...

Just a micro update: Ade Miller has an excellent post on how to delay sign vsto dll's. You can see his blog entry here . Basically he is talking about building the solution and Signing the dll's and then re-signing the manifests. If you or your company use some automated process for signing and releasing...

I have some excellent news for any VSTO developers out there. We've released the first set of Power Tools. You can read more about them here and you can get them from here . Andrew Whitechapel's blog entry covers the tools at pretty good length. If you develop VSTO customizations, go there now, you won...

The other day I was in a meeting and it was mentioned that the new VSTO Deployment model didn't really support a "push" model. I've thought about this for a while and I have to disagree and agree. In software development "supporting" is really more of a Grey scale of difficulty. With enough effort any...

I haven't talked much about what I do here at Microsoft. To be honest I'm not going to go too far into any details about what I am doing but I think it'll be okay to talk about what I did do (up until we shipped VSTO 2008). I am and SDET which basically means I test the product. Really I spend a lot...

It seems like it’s the season of returns. I’ve returned from Idaho which is where I was returned the favor of spreading a cold to my wife (my entire family was fairly sick over the holidays and I managed to catch their particular flavor of cold/flu). What makes this particularly bad is that I was just...

Before I jump right in, I want to give some major credit to the author of the MSDN articles that cover this same information. The information on this Blog is not meant to replace any of the information that is covered in the MSDN, but rather as a supplement and personal look based upon my own observations...

I've tried to start this post about ten times now, and honestly, the problem is that it's a little hard to know where to start. So I'm just going to dive in. With VSTO 2.0 to "trust" your customization, you would have to create Caspol entries for everything, including (I believe) the location of the...