Outlook add-in does not install and work properly on non development machines

Hello,

I am using VS2005 SP1 and outlook 2003. I wrote an outlook add-in that creates a new

menu in message view and written custom code for the same. If i compile the add-in in the VS IDE, it works correctly. If i try to install my self by selecting my addin from Tools-->options-->Other-->advanced--> add-in manager, I get an error message <path> is not a valid office add-in.

I created a windows installer by following the procedure given at

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=597337

Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer: Walkthroughs (Part 2 of 2)

the installer works on my local development machine but when i run this installer on a different machine the add-in appears in the list of add-ins but if i try check the check-box in front of my addin i get this error "Not loaded. A runtime error occured during the loading of the COM Add-in" .
While following the procedure, i noticed that the prerequisites does not list these two things

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Language Pack
How to get them listed in my development machine.

My add-in updates registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, i updated the LoadBehavior to 3 and tried to run it from command-prompt as suggested in the following topics

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showpost.aspx postid=602979

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537179(office.11).aspx

but i dont see any UI or message when starting outlook to understand the actual problem/error and LoadBehavior gets reset to 2 after outlook comes up.

I had also gone through this document.

Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer: Walkthroughs (Part 1 of 2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537173(office.11).aspx

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have been struggling with this for quite sometime and tried to go through different articles and forums but no luck.

Thanks in advance

Kishore

Hi,

I have developed an outlook Add in for outlook 2007 with the help of VSTO. It works fine in the development machine. I had created a setup package and tried installing in another machine.

Installation says successful, but could not see the plugin loaded in Outlook.

Can you please let me know what could be the issues

Thanks in advance,

Kishore.

I am facing the very same issue too. Did you find any solution Kishore I even tried with the sample add-in that is given here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302901

The above sample works just fine in my development environment, but does not work when I build the solution and use the setup program to create the add-in in another PC.

I made sure that the other PC has the lastest .Net runtime and also VSTOR.exe installed. What else do I need to do to get the add-in working

Thanks,

Aravind

Hi Aravind,

I could resolve this issue.

Please refer to the following links

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332051.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332052.aspx

Idea is to allow the security permissions for the addin to execute. This can be manually done by making use of caspol.exe or during the installation itself make use of SetSecurity project which comes with VSTO to set the security permissions.

You have to also consider some registry settings of your addin "LoadBehaviour". This particular value of the addin has to be set to 3 instead of 2. If the value is 2, outlook does not attempts to load that particular addin.

Regards,

Kishore.

Hi Kishore,

Thanks very much for these links. I will take a look at them today and let you know if they worked or not.

Regards,

Aravind