Outlook 2003 add-in stops loading

Question

I created an Outlook 2003 add-in using C# 2.0 in visual studio 2005. This add-in adds a button to the toolbar when someone is replying to or creating a new email. When the user clicks on the button to send an email, the code records this information to the database. This plug-in is used by our sales and marketing teams. IT tells me that at least two or three times a month, they have to uninstall and re-install the add-in to get it to show up. There doesn't seem to be anything we pinpoint that would be causing this to stop loading. Is there anything I can check for to figure out this problem?

Thanks Royal

Answer 1

The most common cause for this symptom is unhandled exceptions, especially in the connection and startup code. Make sure you wrap everything in try catch, especially inside event handlers that get called directly by Outlook.

You also should supply a little more info about the specifics of the symptom. Is the addin disabled (i.e. listed under Disabled Items)? Has its LoadBehavior value in the registry been changed to 2?