Word 2003 plug-in installation on Server 2003

Question

Hi all,

I've had someone else's pile of stuff handed to me. Among these items is a Word 2003 add-in (VSTO 2005 SE, .NET 2.0) that reportedly had been working fine in 2007, but our deployment environment calls for 2003. It installs apparently fine for Office 2003 -- no errors, shows up in add/remove -- but the toolbar is unavailable within Word itself.

Supposedly this works fine in someone's test environment, but I've never seen it working in our common dev environment. We have a setup/deploy project with both a MSI and setup.exe. (I tried packing stuff in CABs just in case, I've tried it with prereqs indepdently installed, no apparent difference.)

The MSI, the setup.exe, right-click installing the setup/deploy project in Visual Studio, none of these methods report an error -- but none of these methods succeed in showing the toolbar in Word 2003 on Server 2003 either. However, if I point Visual Studio at winword.exe for debugging and start the project, the add-in button shows up. It continues showing up on later, independent client startups. It remains available as a toolbar until I explicitly remove it via add/remove or right-click uninstall or running the MSI and removing.

So now I'm at a loss -- what is happening by running in debug that isn't happening during a typical setup/deploy installation?

EDIT: ok, updates. Created a clean VSTO 2005 add-in for Word 2003, new add-in name, clean slate. The same behavior is experienced with a naked project, virgin registry, on both Server 2003 and XP Pro. I'm a local admin on XP, I'm a domain admin on the 2003 box.

Answer 1

Here are some questions for troubleshooting:

• What kind of add-in are you developing? A Shared Add-in or a VSTO? If VSTO which version?
• What OS are you using? Vista can be tricky...

• Check the LoadBehavior of your add-in in the Registry. You find the value either in

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\<add-in class name>\
  

  or

  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\<add-in classname>\
  

If the value of LoadBehavior is 2 your add-in has been disabled during startup. This happens when Word cannot instantiate the add-in, typically because the add-in throws an unhandled exception, or - much more often - because the add-in is not correctly registered.

Have you checked that the VSTO runtime is correctly installed on the target system?

However, even if you use VSTO, for Word the add-in still looks like a classic COM add-in which is extending the classic IDTExtensibility2 interface. Such add-ins must be registered the following way:

• One of the two registry keys above to tell Word the class name of the add-in plus additional information such as the load behavior and a description

• The class name of the add-in must be registered under

  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\<add-in classname>\CSLID
  

• The correct version of the COM component must be registered under (where {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} is the guid of the component as specified under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\\CSLID):

  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}
  

The following two links might also help you further narrowing down your problem:

HOWTO: Troubleshooting Visual Studio and Office add-ins

Troubleshooting Outlook COM Addins – Using ProcMon

Answer 2

EDIT: Full Trust for the add-in assembly ended up being the fix. Doesn't seem to run at anything less than Full Trust.

//

Ended up opening a ticket with Microsoft, and they've educated me about VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms269003(VS.80).aspx

This value defaults to 1; setting it to 0 provides a popup dialog with the exception otherwise being buried.

Still working out the details, and I'll continue to update this thread, but now we finally have a basis on which to move forward:

Could not load file or assembly 'PrintTest2007, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant permission to execute. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131418)


************** Exception Text **************
System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'PrintTest2007, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant permission to execute. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131418)
File name: 'PrintTest2007, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' ---> System.Security.Policy.PolicyException: Execution permission cannot be acquired.
   at System.Security.SecurityManager.ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence, PermissionSet reqdPset, PermissionSet optPset, PermissionSet denyPset, PermissionSet& denied, Boolean checkExecutionPermission)
   at System.Security.SecurityManager.ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence, PermissionSet reqdPset, PermissionSet optPset, PermissionSet denyPset, PermissionSet& denied, Int32& securitySpecialFlags, Boolean checkExecutionPermission)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.AppDomainManagerInternal.HandleOnlineOffline(Exception e, String basePath, String filePath)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.AppDomainManagerInternal.LoadStartupAssembly(EntryPoint entryPoint, Dependency dependency, Dictionary`2 assembliesHash)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.AppDomainManagerInternal.ConfigureAppDomain()
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.AppDomainManagerInternal.LoadAssembliesAndConfigureAppDomain(IHostServiceProvider serviceProvider)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime.AppDomainManagerInternal.LoadEntryPointsHelper(IHostServiceProvider serviceProvider)