Office 2003 PIA Redistributable Package Released, but what is a PIA anyway?
What is PIA?
The acronym PIA stands for Primary Interop Assembly.
An interop assembly contains the needed information that allows .NET managed code that runs under the common language runtime to call unmanaged code in Microsoft Office using the various Microsoft Office COM-based object model APIs (a simplified version from MSDN.)
While any number of interop assemblies may exist that describe a given COM type, only the PIA contains the official description of the types as defined by the publisher of those types.
How does the user gets PIAs on the machine?
PIAs are installed with Microsoft Office 2003, if the user selects "Complete Install" option at the time of installation, provided that .NET Framework 1.1 or higher is present on the system.
If the user had selected "Typical Install" or did not have .NET Framework 1.1 or higher on the system at the time of installing Microsoft Office 2003, then the PIAs can be downloaded and installed from the following location:
Official Download location on Microsoft.com:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3c9a983a-ac14-4125-8ba0-d36d67e0f4ad&displaylang=en
If you are enthused to learn more about PIAs, MSDN has some very useful articles:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/stagsdk/html/stconWhatArePIAs_HV01083418.asp
Art Leonard and Patrick Smith talk about Office 2003 PIA Redistributable package on their blogs.
If you've used the Office 2003 PIA Redistributable package, please share your experience. Thank you.
