Office Development with Visual Studio : runtime

Will your VSTO addin run on Office 2010 64-bit? Yes, probably. (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:05:00 GMT

The Visual Studio team is designing the runtime components for Office 2010 so that your Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 .NET addins, document solutions and spreadsheet solutions will run on 64-bit Office 2010. These runtime components will ship with Office 2010, so your end-users won’t even have to download a new runtime! How easy is that? There are a few rare exceptions that I’ll discuss in this blog entry.

The miracle of managed code allows you to write C# or Visual Basic .NET code that compiles to “Any CPU” using the Compile setting in your Visual Studio project. Your code compiles to MSIL with Visual Studio, and then at runtime it gets JIT compiled to the correct chip set, either AMD, Intel, 32-bit or 64-bit. The first exception to this wondrous technology is the oldest versions of .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 will not enable this 64-bit transformation.

The other thing to lookout for is calls to process invoke (p/invoke) in your code. If you try to call native API methods using p/invoke you could have issues with your VSTO solution running properly on 64-bit Office 2010.

You will have problems if your code makes deliberate calls to p/invoke a Win32 API that does not have exactly the same signature (method name, parameter list, and DLL name) of an equivalent Win64 API. This is true for any solution you write regardless of targeting Office as the platform. You can find a ton of information in MSDN and blogs by such luminaries as Scott Hanselman about writing Windows API calls so that they will run on either 32-bit or 64-bit Windows. Here is a generalized code snippet for handling cases where the method name or the DLL name is different:

//YourFunction has the same name, parameters, and DLL name in 32bit and 64bit
YourFunction();

Import("LIBRARY", EntryPoint = "YOURFUNCTION", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
private static extern bool YouFunction();



//In some cases, the method name is different in Win32 API and Win64 API, 
//so use the following code block in stead of the above 3 lines of code.
if (Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(IntPtr)) == 4)
{
    YourFunction32();
}
else if (Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(IntPtr)) == 8)
{
    YourFunction64();
}



Import("LIBRARY32", EntryPoint = "YOURFUNCTION32", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
private static extern bool YourFunction32();

Import("LIBRARY64", EntryPoint = " YOURFUNCTION64", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
private static extern bool YourFunction64();

Resources:

Here are more resources to help you author your solutions today so that they will run without needing a recompile when your users install 64-bit Office 2010.

MSDN Library Visual Studio 2005 article on developing 64-bit Applications

MSDN Library Visual Studio 2008 article on developing 64-bit Applications

How to access the “real” x64 registry from a Win32 .NET Application – Part I

The Myth of .NET Purity, Reloaded

For migrating your really old apps with lots of native calls to .NET, try checking if your native calls have an equivalent .NET call:

Microsoft Win32 to Microsoft .NET Framework API Map

Interoperating with Unmanaged Code

Finally I should mention that this is my last post (for a while at least) on this blog because I am leaving Microsoft. I’m going to work on a charity project teaching robotics programming to high school kids in my “inner city” neighborhood for at least the next 6 months. The project is called Team Xbot! Keep an eye on these kids as they go on to good colleges and great jobs in the next few years!

Sincerely, Christin Boyd, Program Manager

Removing Customization Code Before E-Mailing a Document (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:54:00 GMT

When you create a document-level customization for a document, all the copies of the document will be customized too. Even if you save a copy of the document with a different name, when the document is opened it'll try to find and run the code. All the saved data will still be there, it'll just pop up an annoying error message.

In this video I show a couple of ways to remove a customization from a document before you send it to someone.

Resources

ServerDocument.RemoveCustomization Method (2007 System)

ServerDocument.RemoveCustomization Method (2003 System)

ServerDocument Sample

Managing Documents on a Server by Using the ServerDocument Class

Duration: 2 minutes, 19 seconds

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Assembly Could Not Be Found or Could Not Be Loaded (Harry Miller)

VSTO Team — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:54:51 GMT

This video tells the story of someone who created an Excel 2003 workbook project in Visual Studio 2008. No matter what configuration he tried on the client machine, he got this error when opening the workbook:

The assembly could not be found or could not be loaded.

Here's the setup:
Windows XP Professional
PIAs for Office 2003 are installed
VSTO version 3 runtime is installed
The .NET 2.0 configuration tool shows the assembly is trusted
CASPOL.exe shows the assembly is trusted

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending.

Resources:

Forum post: The assembly * could not be found at or could not be loaded

Visual Studio Tools for Office Second Edition Runtime

How to: Install the Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime

Video duration: 1 minute, 36 seconds

Aggregating blogs in a blog (Mary Lee)

VSTO Team — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:59:00 GMT

There are many resources to learn about Visual Studio Tools for Office, and they are scattered through blogdom and even the MSDN Library. In my one year on this team, I've collected various helpful links that I share here.

The Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (3.0) whitepapers written by subjet matter expert like MVPs in the Microsoft Office Development section of the MSDN Library. These complement the Visual Studio Tools for Office documentation.

Several VSTO team members share their expertise on their own blogs. Misha discusses how to use an unofficial feature of Microsoft Office to deploy to alll users in Deploying your VSTO Add-In to All Users (Part I) and Deploying your VSTO Add-In to All Users (Part II). Andrew explains Why is VS development is not supported with multiple versions of Office? TQ details Why there is a separate VSTO runtime apart from the .NET Framework and Microsoft Office. Kris compares the VS2005 and VS2008 VSTO security models in The passphrase is "Install already": A new look at VSTO Security.

- Mary Lee, programming writer.