Shared addin using .net - deployment for non admins

[Moshe Malin]

Hello,

My main target is to deploy a shared add-in (developped with .Net, for XP,
OL2003, 2007) to non-admin users.

We assume they already have the CLR.
We know that we can use HKCU instead of HKLM.
But: we cannot assume the PIA are already installed, and this is our main
problem.

Is there a way to deploy the PIA dlls without admin rights (MS PIA
installation puts it in the GAC and requiers admin right) ?
Can we use the PIA dlls locally (say, in the execuation directory), instead
of using it from the GAC?
Is there any alternative for PIA that does not require admin rights (like
making our own IA)?

Thanks.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Unless you control the deployment and provisioning of all those machines
it's not safe to assume that the Framework has been installed. It is not
installed for Office 2007 or any earlier version and only is there by
default for CD installations of Windows XP SP2 or higher, or for Vista.

It's really not recommended at all to deploy official PIA's to an
application specific folder, it will cause PIA hell. And if something else
deploys a PIA to the GAC that's where Fusion will look first, therefore
possibly forcing you code to run with a different or incompatible PIA. PIA's
like those from MS really need to be deployed to the GAC.

I'd also be careful with any PIA that is derived from the official PIA for
Outlook 2002, it has bugs and needs modifications to work correctly.

An alternative would be using a PIA-less solution but then you have to
specify the complete interfaces for everything the PIA would handle, so for
things as big as the Office and Outlook PIA's it would be a ton of work to
implement a PIA-less solution.

 

[Moshe Malin]

Thank you.

It means, actually, that there is no reasonable way to deploy add-in for non
admins.
Before going to C++ solution - is there any resource that can point to a way
that might achieve non-admin deployment?

I've tried searching the web, but failed to find such.


[About the .net framework, my assumption was that users without .net must
install it first, it's out of non-admin scope]

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Installing the Framework also requires admin permissions you know.

If this is some sort of rollout then you can have admins install the
Framework and the PIA's as separate from the code installation. Language
choice makes no difference, the only difference would be if you used
unmanaged code in whatever language (C++, VB6, Delphi, etc.) and then you
don't need either the Framework or the PIA's.