Add-in Express and Visual Studio 2005 – all is just beginning
We have just published Add-in Express for Visual Studio 2005. At last! We have been trying to do it since the first beta of VS 2005. However, all betas didn’t have things necessary for us. Add-in Express contains a large portion of design-time code. It is the code that generates projects based on Add-in Express and allows you to work with the add-in modules as forms. Naturally, this code is closely connected with the Visual Studio IDE object model. And porting this code to Visual Studio 2005 makes me think that Visual Studio 2005 is a bit raw.
For example, we haven’t managed to implement the automatic generation of setup projects since API necessary for it is not stable yet. That is why Add-in Express includes the setup.txt in each new project that explains how to create a setup project manually. Another example. It is still impossible to use Add-in Express for VS 2003 and VS 2005 on one PC at the same time. By default, .NET Framework 2.0 configurates COM servers in such a way that add-ins developed for .NET Framework 1.1 cannot be run.
I’m sure, we will get rid of these limitations in Add-in Express for VS2005. However, we will be able to do this after MS has published the first service pack for VS 2005. Or, do you think they will fix all this in sp2? :-) In general, Add-in Express and Visual Studio 2005 – all is just beginning.
Links
Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 compatibility:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnnetdep/html/netfxcompat.asp
A special update for Microsoft Office 2003
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1B0BFB35-C252-43CC-8A2A-6A64D6AC4670&displaylang=en