Office 2003 PIAs

[zfeld]

1. Where do I get the Office 2003 PIAs? On the MSDN download site there are
only downloads for XP office PIAs. Do they automatically get installed to
the GAC with the installation of office 2003?

2. My problem is that I am developing an application in C# that does office
automation using Word & Excel that needs to work for Office XP and Office
2003.

After reading all the different posts I am still confused. My development
computer has Office XP installed, I installed the Office XP PIAs to the GAC
as recomended by the MSDN my reference in my solution tree points to the
GAC.

At my clients site the few computers that have a development environment I
installed the Office XP PIAs by using the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command
prompt. Is this a problem being that my client has Office 2003 installed?

For the other computers I put the necessary DLLs from the PIA in the same
directory as my .EXE. This seems to work. Except for one computer with
Office 2003 on it, that throws an exception that "module not found" whenever
Word is invoked through my application. Weirdly enough when Excel is invoked
from that same computer it works. What can be broken with Word reference?

3. What about late binding? Is that an idea? Is it very slow? What are the
relevant lines of code for C#? DO I remove all references in my solution
space to Word and Excel? When it gets to my client's machine will it
reference the local office XP dlls bundled with my app or the Office 2003
dlls in the GAC? Will I then run into problems with incompatible code, I
heard that office 2003 added another parameter in Word to open() ? Is there
any way when using late binding to figure out what version of Word it found
and then if/else the incompatible code?

 

[Carlos J. Quintero [MVP]]

1) If you do a complete install of Office 2003, you'll get the PIAs
installed into the GAC automatically. It's strongly recommended that you do
a complete install. With a typical install, the PIAs are installed on
demand. See:

Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/stagsdk/html/stconPIAs.asp

For the remaining items, see:

INFO: Develop Microsoft Office Solutions with Visual Studio .NET
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311452/en-us