deploying office 2007 add-ins

UPDATE: visit http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2006/10/01/13547.aspx for the link to download SnopeIt!

if you've installed the visual studio tools for office beta 2 second edition (man everytime i read our product names, it hurts), you'll notice that when you create an add-in project, it automatically creates a setup project along side it for you -- great idea (since you'll need a method to deploy it anyway).

when i started to play around with the vsto tools and my SnopeIt add-in, the installer wasn't working for me.  it deployed fine, but outlook was giving a runtime load error.  after some investigation i figured it was something with security.  some colleagues were kind enough to point me to a solution.

an article on msdn titled 'Deploying Office Documents that Use Managed Code Extensions' outlines a setup helper class (among one method) to implement the trust mechanism required for the add-in.  I literally did a cut/paste of the code in a SetupHelper assembly, plopped it in to my setup custom actions and it worked great.

one thing i did have to change was the CustomActionData.  it indicated something like:

   1:  /path="[TARGETDIR]My Word Bookmarks_bin/My Word Bookmarks.dll"

i think the article was written for office 2003 add-ins and there may be a different deployment model hence the _bin folder.  i found it wasn't necessary and just changed it to (changing to your assembly of course):

   1:  /path="[TARGETDIR]My Word Bookmarks.dll"

this worked great for me.  so now that i have that worked out, here is the download link to the rough cut version of my simple SnopeIt add-in.  it simply launches snopes.com with the subject line -- like i said, simple.  i'm using this to learn more about the office 2007 development model though and will adjust when i get more time to some more features...any suggestions?

SnopeItSetup.msi