Have you ever tried to code with Office VSTO? Found it difficult to develop or deploy it? I have spent a great deal of time and energy developing Office Outlook add-ins over the last year. I have successfully done so with the out of the box tools in VS 2008 and VSTO 3.0. Microsoft has done a great job getting VSTO 3.0 to be very powerful and feature rich but I did find some issues that really caused me weeks of headaches and frustration.
But recently I was asked to take what we developed in house and create a deployment package for not just MS Office 2007 but also 2003 and imbed a SQL Express installation and seed data into the MSI.
This presented various problems seeing how I was first using only Office 2007 and deploying internally with the “Click Once” technology.
When I tried to develop an MSI I found it was not very straight forward as one might think. When researching I found 2 really good walkthroughs for deploying MS Solutions using an MSI. Please see Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2) and Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer: Walkthroughs (Part 2 of 2) if you are interested in trying this yourself from scratch.
Otherwise you may want to take a look at this 3rd party vendor who created a nice VS add-in and Project Templates to help not only deploy but also make it version independent. The company is called Add-In Express. Their tools are by far some of the best I have found and as far as the cost.
Ease of use is phenomenal also. They have wizards that will walk you right through project creation and deployment. Also they have real good samples on their entire feature set so that you can get a good idea how to proceed right from scratch.
If you are doing any production worthy coding in MS Office 2003 or 2007 and want ease of development and deployment this is by far the best route to go.
Check them out and let me know what you think.
About Me
- Jody A Morgan
- Jody Morgan is a Systems and Software Architect. Since 1999, Jody has developed a distinctive approach to solving business needs with Microsoft Technologies. Jody has worked in the Manufacturing, Retail, Transportation/Logistics, Healthcare, Staffing firms as well as for the Federal Government. Jody is strong in the Windows Application and back office architecture. He has help write coding standards along with patterns and practices for specific clients to fit their needs and unique conditions. Proficient in C# and VB as well as SQL Script. Jody has worked hard to collect a broad knowledge base of both software development and IT infrastructure to blend with his ability to help understand and solve business needs of his clients. Jody is passionate about sharing knowledge and educating the masses. “Knowledge leads to meditation which leads to insight which leads to inspiration. Without Inspiration we would all still live in caves and carry clubs.” -Jody
For me such problem is quite complicated. But I see some ways of resolving it. First and general way is the special software. Second specialist's consultation. I might advise the first way. Several weeks ago I used like tool and it has many good resources for working out almost every kind of problem related to MS Outlook - pst data viewing.
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