How to support Office 2013 in your Add-in Express based projects
Recently Microsoft has made Office 2013 Consumer Preview available, so I am announcing its support by the next generation of our products. We added the complete support for all core extensibility technologies including COM add-ins, XLL add-ons and RTD Servers.
100% compatibility with your existing projects
Despite the heading above, Office 2013 is on the Consumer Preview stage, which is why there are some inessential limitations. Consult the Know Issues section of the ADX releases.
Application-level extensibility – COM add-ins
They work :) Nevertheless, you should pay attention to the fact that Outlook has started to monitor COM add-ins’ performance through several add-in specific events and automatically disable them if certain limits are exceeded. This is called by a beautiful word “Resilience”. In fact, it was implemented already in Outlook 2010, but it is Outlook 2013 that causes biggest troubles to us. However, we have managed to cope with it! I cannot tell you how because a little magic was involved ;)
Nevertheless, I have to draw attention of all Outlook developers to the Resilience. Add-in Express bypasses it on the core level, but we do not carry responsibility for your applied code. There is only one way for you – optimizing your code. And testing, testing, testing… :)
Advanced Outlook Regions and Advanced Task Panes
Completely redesigned :) Probably you have noticed that the entire Office UX is totally redesigned. Alongside with it, we have slightly repainted our regions and task panes for Office 2007 and 2010. We will show you screenshots for all Offices a bit later.
Excel plug-ins – XLL and RTDS
Surprisingly, they work too! :) No changes.
Your existing projects and Office 2013 – 100% compatibility
To anticipate your questions I’ll repeat it again – our main idea is the complete compatibility. Thus, all your existing projects will work on Office 2013 after you rebuild them with the new Add-in Express.
4 Comments
Tried to open an existing AddinExpress project in Excel 2013 and got the following:
“What happened:
AddinExpress.XL.ADXExcelTaskPanesManager error: Excel version is not defined.
Where presumably this happened:
Error occurred in ADXExcelTaskPanesManager.DoAddinInitialize.”
Hi Adam,
Did you rebuild your add-in using version 7 of Add-in Express? You need to do this because only this version supports Office 2013 applications.
I installed the latest version of Add-in-express today because two add-ins built previously were not compatible with Office 2013. All I did was update the references to point to the new versions of AddinExpress.MSO.2005 and AddinExpress.OL.2005. The Outlook addin works; the Word addin completetly fails to load. When you say “rebuild your add-in using version 7” is anything required beyond simply installing Version 7? Do I need to manually replace adxloader and adxlauncher? What is adxregistrator?
Hello Steve,
Adxregistrator is an executable that actually registers/unregisters your add-in when MSI deployment is used. If you use ClickOnce, you would need to replace adxloader.dll and adxloader64.dll in the Loader folder of your project with these files from the {Add-in Express}\Redistributables folder. As to the launcher, a correct version of it will be used autmatically, if you re-publish your add-in.
There’s apossiblity the Word add-in failed due to some other reason. Could you please re-install it, run Word and send me a copy of this file:
– {My Documents}\Add-in Express\adxloader.log in the profile of the user who starts Word
Please send your email to the support email address. You find it in {Add-in Express installation folder}\readme.txt. Also, please make sure your email contains a link to this page.