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Office interop: developing with 2003 PIAs on a machine with Office 2007

Answer 1

+1 A:

I've found the only way to do this, even with both versions installed side-by-side, in .Net v2 and above, was to add a reference to the PIA (rather than the COM lib). Frameork v1.1 would actually bind to the correct version, if they were present side-by-side.

Rowland Shaw 2009-07-01 21:47:15

I can't find the PIA file anywhere.

Joel Coehoorn 2009-07-01 21:54:53

Okay: I'm an idiot. I couldn't find the file in the server's GAC, but the 2007 version (and only the 2007 version, even though I've explicitly installed the 2003 PIAs) is in my local GAC. Unfortunately, this still doesn't work on the server and it just hangs when I try to open the Access file. But that's a whole different question

Joel Coehoorn 2009-07-01 23:27:29

I must admit, to get the PIAs in the first place, we extracted them from the GAC (the Office XP PIAs came in a nice ZIP which made them easier to get hold of).Not sure on the licensing implications, but could you side by side the PIA? (obviously would still need Access on there)

Rowland Shaw 2009-07-02 08:02:04

Licensing should be moot: this will go to a single customer that does have Office on the machine. We can install from the msi if needed, but can't update the office version on the machine.

Joel Coehoorn 2009-07-02 19:07:30

Answer 2

A:

Can't you copy the PIA from the server to your machine (to a local folder) and then add a reference to that copy?

If you like to go another way you could avoid using the PIAs and use ComImport instead. Andrew Whitechapel has the details in his blog:

Add-ins for Multiple Office Versions without PIAs

Update (from comment): If you can't locate the Access PIA on the server you could try the following:

Download the Office 2003 PIA setup from here: Office 2003 Update: Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies
Extract the self-extracting executable on the command line (/? will list the options):
```
>O2003PIA.exe /C /T:C:\PIA
```
Run the extracted MSI with full logging enabled:
```
>msiexec -i O2003PIA.msi /l*vx log.txt
```
and check the log for the Access interop assembly and further hints whether anything went wrong with the installation. Alternatively to this step you could use an MSI unpacker utility to geth the assembly.

0xA3 2009-07-01 21:53:00

No, the PIA file doesn't exist on the server anywhere, even after I downloaded and installed them manually.

Joel Coehoorn 2009-07-01 22:09:47

BTW: interesting solution in the link, but if I used something like that I'd be laughed out of the room at code review time. I can see it now: "WTF is all this crap?"

Joel Coehoorn 2009-07-01 22:12:09

Indeed. Looking forward to VS 2010 which will handle all the ComImports for you nicely...

0xA3 2009-07-01 22:21:59

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Office interop: developing with 2003 PIAs on a machine with Office 2007

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