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Signing your Office solutions with a certificate is a mandatory step, but there are several optional steps that can change the way the certificate is presented to the end user or customer. This example uses a Visual Studio generated test certificate, but the dialog box is similar to what you would see...

You have probably been reading and hearing about Microsoft Office 2010 for some months. Now, you may be wondering how much work is necessary to install your existing Office 2007/VSTO 3.0 solutions on customer computers that have Office 2010. Perhaps you’re thinking about migrating the Windows Installer...

Aaron wrote a great article about the VSTO runtime components earlier, which explained the Office extensions for .NET Framework 3.5 and Office extensions for .NET Framework 4. He also explained that starting in Microsoft Office 2010, the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office runtime is included and does...

Office solutions for .NET Framework 4 have dependencies on files that are distributed in the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office runtime, but there are also files outside of the runtime that are required for Office solutions to run on end-user computers. These files are the following: Microsoft.Office...

I was chatting with some of my friends about Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 and they asked me why should they move their application to .Net Framework 4, I am answering the question here for everybody to benefit. Frankly speaking there is no definitive answer; it is like there is no single pill...

The “Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Deployment.FrameworkVersionMismatchException” is thrown due to the specific implementation of how VSTO 2010 runtime loads the appropriate CLR to install a VSTO customization. This exception is thrown when both .NET Framework 3.5 (CLR 2.0) and .NET Framework...

You can use two methods to trust an Office solution created in Visual Studio and not show a trust prompt to the end-user. Sign your Office solution with certificate that chains to a trusted root authority and is in the Trusted Publisher list. Sign your Office solution with a certificate and...

An often-requested feature for VSTO add-ins is the ability to install an add-in for all users of a machine. Misha Shneerson had blogged about a workaround to enable this scenario here . This workaround is not recommended. Now, deploying an add-in to All Users is supported for both Microsoft Office 2007...

During development of the VSTO 2010 Runtime we added a feature, dubbed Install on Demand , to support VSTO customizations that target both .NET Framework 3.5 and .NET Framework 4 without enforcing installation of both frameworks prior to installation of VSTO 2010. To facilitate this we needed to break...

I have previously posted how you can specify various properties for a VSTO solution like the Publisher and Product Names by tweaking a few files in Visual Studio 2008. With Visual Studio 2010 ( Beta 2 ) you can edit these properties directly through the Publish Page. All Office projects in Visual Studio...

One frequent customer question is about how to deploy an application and all of its prerequisites in a single .msi or .exe file. This question applies whether you are deploying any of the following: Microsoft Office 2003 solutions with dependencies on .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio Tools for Office...

One of the VSTO MVPs pointed out that in some cases his customers were unable to resolve UNC paths consistently.  When he investigated further, he found that some branch offices of an enterprise were unable to resolve the UNC path ( \\myserver\myvstoapps\installpath\ ) because of the way they setup...

Starting in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you can perform additional tasks after an Office solution is installed known as a post-deployment action. For example, you can copy a customized Office document and create registry keys on the end user computer. You can compare these to Windows Installer custom...

Starting in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you can deploy multiple Office solutions in a single ClickOnce installer. For example, you can develop two Office solutions (one for Outlook and another for Excel) and combine these into a single installer with a single entry in the Add/Remove Programs list in Windows...

Many customers have reported issues with installing a VSTO project that has been published with Visual Studio 2008 running on the recently released Windows 7 Release Candidate. If you published your solution using VS2008 on a machine running the Windows 7 RC and then you try to install the solution...

ClickOnce manifest signing can be a little confusing for someone going through the process the very first time. This is probably because it involves signing multiple files in a particular sequence. Once you understand the process conceptually it becomes fairly easy to follow. In this post, I hope to...

I just posted another interview on Channel 9 . I sit down again with Saurabh Bhatia, a Program Manager on the Office Client team, who is responsible for the ClickOnce publishing functionality in Visual Studio. We chat about trust issues and certificates and he sets me straight on how ClickOnce deployment...

In Deploying Office Solutions with a Setup Project (Mary Lee) , you read about how to deploy Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions with Windows Installer (.msi) in Visual Studio 2008.  With Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, the steps are the same: add the project output to the Setup project...

When you are done developing your customized Microsoft Excel 2007 or Microsoft Word 2007 document-level project in Visual Studio 2008, you may want to publish it to a SharePoint document library for others to use from the SharePoint site, or they can copy the file from the site to their desktop to use...

In an attempt to make this easier to read here are a few terms I will be using frequently in this article: VSTOR = Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (version 3.0 Runtime) (x86) VSTORSP1 = Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (version 3.0 Runtime) Service Pack...

After you develop Office solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office, you can use Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to simplify your deployment experience. First, you can take advantage of the smaller .NET Framework Client Profile to decrease download time. Next, the Office 2007 primary interop assemblies (PIAs...

You may want to develop Microsoft Office 2003 solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 for several reasons. Your customers are using Microsoft Office 2003. Your customers are using both Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Your customers are...

The other day I was asked about the automatic Updates feature of VSTO 3.0 deployment. In this scenario, he used the Publish Wizard in VS 2008 to create a Word document solution and the install manifest. Then a bunch of people used the Word document, and kicked off the installer which then copied things...

Recently in the Visual Studio Tools for Office forum , a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 developer asked how to include the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 in the same directory as the application.  For example, you can select Download prerequisites from the same location as my application in the Prerequisites...

In Deploying an Office solution using Windows Installer , you read how to deploy document-level Office 2007 solutions with Windows Installer.  As a follow up, you can now see how to add a Setup project to your VSTO solution and add a custom action to update custom document properties. This example...