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Visual Studio Setup Registry Entries for VSTO Addin Deployment

OK so I’m building a Project 2010 addin using Visual Studio 2010 (VSTO) and I got tired of the clickonce deployment option. I added a Visual Studio installer project to my solution and went about following the advice on this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/ff937654.aspx

It was mostly pretty good. A bit confusingly worded in a few places but I wrote that off to me not having enough real development background to pick up on the flow as I might if I was an experienced dev. In the section on registry entries it made mention of this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386106.aspx. It also showed sample registry entries settings and how to set them up in your installer project. I followed these to the letter and matched mine up with their screenshot to make sure they matched. For the Manifest entry mine was:

"[TARGETDIR]ADDINNAME.vsto|vstolocal"

I used this and my addin installed the proper ribbon tabs and buttons which meant that the system was able to interpret my entry enough to install my code into Project 2010. But some of my code was not quite working properly.

Two of my dialog boxes should have read in a default value from an Application setting but the combobox controls that should have contained these defaults were blank. Click events for buttons were not firing off the code connected to them. The load event of a graphing control did not fire so while the graph control was there with the right visual settings it contained no data.

I spent most of last night and much of the early part of this morning trying to figure out what was going wrong. I rebuilt my setup project from scratch. I double checked dependencies and looked to make sure I was building my setup project based on the right output, etc, etc. No Joy.

I then checked in with old friend Colby Africa, one of the resident developer geniuses over at forProject to see what I was doing wrong. He had seen some roughly similar oddities in one of his projects and his research with his contacts suggested that I needed to add ‘file:///’ to the beginning of my registry setting in my Manifest key. It had something to do with the way the system interpreted the entry.

I was skeptical but did it anyway. My Manifest entry was now “file:///[TARGETDIR]ADDINNAME.vsto|vstolocal". I rebuilt my setup project and reinstalled my addin and poof! It worked!

As always, having smart friends is at least as important as being smart yourself! :-)

What do you wish Project 2010 could do, but doesn’t?

I’m working on a toolkit for Project 2010 that will have several tools and utilities that people have, over the years, asked me to write for them in VBA.

 

I'm looking for feature suggestions from the crowd. What do wish there was a button for in Project 2010? do you want to run a series of checks against your project to make sure your tasks and resources abide by a set of standard rules? Do you want to create a logfile of all the new tasks, task deletions, resource assignments, etc for that project? How about a tool to remove rates and costs from a schedule before you send it to a client or partner? What about one that lets you prepend or append some text to the Task Name of a set of selected tasks? Well my toolkit has these already. What would you like to see?

Send me an email at [email protected] and tell me what you wish there was a button for and I will try to add it to the toolkit.