Can I use RegFree Com with an application written in Excel VBA?

Question

I have an application that is written in Excel VBA, myApp.xls. Currently we use InstallShield to distribute the application. Since we are moving to Windows Vista, I need to be able to install the application as a standard user. This does not allow for me to update the registry during the install process. In addition to the excel application we also have several VB6 applications. In order to install those applications, I was able to use RegFree com and Make My Manifest (MMM) as suggested by people on this forum (I greatly appreciate the insight btw!). This process, although a bit tedious, worked well. I then packaged the output from MMM in a VS '05 installer project and removed the UAC prompt on the msi using msiinfo.exe. Now I am faced with installing an application that basically lives in an Excel file. I modified a manifest that MMM created for me for one of my VB6 apps and tried to run the excel file through that, but I did not have much luck. Does anybody know of a way to do this? Does RegFree com work with VBA? Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to use registration-free COM through VBA, on Win2k3+.

Fundamentally, reg-free says "this COM class no longer needs to be registered to be discoverable, instead registration info will be carried by a manifest".

Manifests themselves are implictly referenced by executables when they are embedded in the executable, or named *.exe.manifest. However, in the case of VBA -- your code doesn't live in an executable you control, so you need another way to get a reference to the manifest.

That's where the Microsoft.Windows.ActCtx object comes in - it specifically allows you to instantiate your object given an explicit manifest reference.

For example (in JS, since I'm rusty on VBA syntax):

var actCtx = WScript.CreateObject("Microsoft.Windows.ActCtx");
actCtx.Manifest = "myregfree.manifest";
var obj =  actCtx.CreateObject("MyObj");

Answer 2

Hi did you find a solution to this in the end... I'm doing pretty much the same thing and I'm searching for an answer...

Cheers

DM