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I have Visual Studio 2010 installed on my Windows XP development machine along with Office 2007 Professional and Office 2010 Professional. I am trying to develop several add-ins for Office 2007; however, I prefer to use Office 2010 on a day-to-day basis.

How do I set Visual Studio 2010 to install the add-in and open Word 2007 when I press debug? Currently, Word 2010 opens, but does not recognize the add-in. Unless I have to, I would like to keep Office 2010 installed.

+1  A: 

I don't know the specific answer to your question, but I am running Office 2010 and still working on Office 2007 add-in development.

My solution to this problem has been virtual machines. I don't do any development work on my laptop's primary OS. I don't even have Visual Studio installed there, but I am running Office 2010 and really like it so far.

For development I've got dozens of different VMs with various configurations of OS and Office version and other 3rd party software that I need to integrate with. I'm currently using Windows 7 and the new version of Windows Virtual PC, but I started this practice when I was using Windows XP and Virtual PC 2007.

One benefit of this is that if something goes wrong on one of my VMs, it doesn't bring down my whole machine.

I also don't start from scratch each time I need a new VM. I've got base images with only the OS installed, as well as OS + Office and OS + Office + Visual Studio, but nothing else. That way, whenever I need a new VM, I just make a copy of the base image that's closest to what I need and go from there. The only limitation is that the base images can't be joined to a domain, but that's not a big deal for me.

I would encourage you to try this yourself. It works great.

Dennis Palmer