installing outlook com addin

[Lars Roland]

High, I have 3 questions:

1) I have created a COM addin to outlook, using VB6. I am compiling the addin
on Visual studio 6.0, but i want to create the installer using visual
studio .Net (it creates a nice msi file) -

can this be done some way (eg. I need to get visual studio .Net to find
out what dll my project is dependant on (redemtion and others) and
include them).

If i just create a setup project in VS.Net and add the files as
dependencies to this project, then the final installer can not register my
compiled dll (because the dll, can not find the other dll's it is depended
on).

Another way would be to move the project to VB.Net, but this conversion
can not be done because my program uses the doEvents function wich is now
a part of the .Net framework, and I do not want to force my users to
install this.

2) Is there some online information, on best practices in getting an addin
to work on all of the major outlook versions (eg. 2000, xp and 2003). Is
it enough just to use the office 9.0 object libary ???.

3) Is there some way to ensure that a VB.Net project can run on machines
not having the .Net framework installed ??? - eg. even though I have only
included COM dll's I somehow ended up having to install the .Net framework
on my test machine.


Regards.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Any DotNet addin requires that the Framework is installed and the PIA's
would be different for each version of Outlook you need to support.

For COM addins to support more than one version of Outlook you develop using
the oldest Outlook library you want to support. In this case Outlook 2000.
The code will run in later versions with no problems (other than properties
or methods that might be restricted for security reasons such as access to
..Body or .HTMLBody). For that you need to be using Redemption.

When I include Redemption in my MSI packages I always mark it as
self-registering, although I develop my MSI files using InstallShield.

I have no idea about using the VS.NET packaging software with non-DotNet
compilations. However there is a mostly undocumented Visual Studio Installer
that builds MSI packages in VS 6 (not sure if it's only in the Enterprise
version) and there's a download from MS called Orca that helps with building
MSI packages.

Those aren't as nice to use as something like InstallShield but they are
usable. There are also inexpensive versions of commercial package builders
that run about $500 or so and some products such as Borland's Delphi include
cut-down versions of InstallShield Express which can be used to build MSI
packages.

 

[Andrew Cushen]

Ken Slovak mentioned :
<<
there is a mostly undocumented Visual Studio Installer
that builds MSI packages in VS 6
The Visual Studio Installer is free for download at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/tools/vsi11/dow
nload.aspx
It works nicely for basic installs, and creates a "nice
MSI package".

-Andrew Cushen
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