Writing a shim to solve problems with managed Office COM Add-ins

re: Writing a shim to solve problems with managed Office COM Add-ins

Snorrk — Sat, 08 May 2004 10:33:00 GMT

Woha! Seems to good to be true :) Thanks!

>S

Programming for Outlook using managed code is better with a Shim

Omar Shahine's WebLog — Thu, 13 May 2004 08:25:00 GMT

re: Writing a shim to solve problems with managed Office COM Add-ins

Bill — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 16:23:00 GMT

I've followed the MSDN step-by-step article to the point where it states to sign the unmanaged shim. I don't know how to do that?

Also, the example uses the "HelloCOMAddInVB.snk" key in the Assembly attribute. Does that mean the managed addin is already properly being "strong named"? Is there something else I must do with it?

re: Writing a shim to solve problems with managed Office COM Add-ins

Dan Crevier — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 17:12:00 GMT

You need to follow these instructions to sign your shim. I have not actually gone through that process, so I can't comment on specifics:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsmarttag/html/odc_dcss.asp

By strongly named assembly, I meant that the szAddInAssemblyName variable needs to have the public key in there. You should use your own key pair, not the .snk file that was provided in the sample.

re: Writing a shim to solve problems with managed Office COM Add-ins

brian — Sat, 19 Jun 2004 02:27:00 GMT

Thanks for posting the tip about not adding the public token string in the shim. I was pulling my hair out all day trying to figure out why things weren't working.

For some reason whenever you recompile a dll you get a new public key token which causes A LOT of extra work in the build process. I would expect that since everyone goes through the trouble of using a snk key that this public key token wouldn't change. Also, if you don't check the 'Register for COM Interop' option in the vb project the connect method isn't called for debugging.

We're writing an add-in for visio and to authenticode sign everything and make it work we have to do these steps:
1. Compile the managed add-in on it's own
2. get the public key token with sn -t
3. Put the public key token in the unmanaged shim public token string
4. compile the unmanaged shim.
5. Authenticode sign the unmanaged shim
6. Add the managed addin and unmanaged shim to the installer binaries (we don't use the built in installer with .net as it's got TONS of problems).
7. Build and test installer

Note that after step 3 if you build or rebuild your addin the key will change and the unmanaged addin will no longer call it; you have to start over.

So far I'm only doing this with our dll's and I've just gotten it to work. Thanks for your tip.

need help

Sven — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 16:02:00 GMT

can you provide an example project with c#?

my problem is, that my shim will not load in word

the addin is written in c#, i followed the steps from the article

everything is compiled fine, the shim is registered correctly but is not shown under word-comaddins

re: Writing a shim to solve problems with managed Office COM Add-ins

Dan Crevier — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 04:52:00 GMT

I'm not that familiar with Word add-ins. Was it loading before you added the shim?

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