Office 2003 and extensibility.dll deployment blues

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I have been trying to create a deployment for a C# Outlook 2003 add-in. It requires only NET 2.0 and relies on IDTExtensibility2 (of Extensibility.dll). Upon making sure Office 2003 PIA are installed the add-in still won't register because of Could not load file or assembly 'Extensibility, Version=7.0.3300.0, Culture=nuetral, PublicKeyToken=b03f57f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)

I don't think deploying Extensiblity.dll is legal and I could not make it work even if it was. So how to make sure it is available on the target PC?

I could not find an adequate solution anywhere.

The solution is developed in VS 2010.

c#
vsto
office-addins
asked on Stack Overflow Aug 14, 2012 by wpfwannabe • edited Aug 15, 2012 by wpfwannabe

3 Answers

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If your outlook add-in is signed using a strong name key then any external libs that you reference will also need to be strong name signed.

I've had a similar problem to yours in the past where 3rd party libraries were not signed with a strong name.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 15, 2012 by Jamie Dixon
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After doing a bit of searching around I came across this Microsoft Support article that provides a resolution.

In brief:

When you use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to create add-ins, smart documents, or smart tags, you may experience the following symptoms:

  • The add-ins, the smart documents, or the smart tags cannot be loaded in any Microsoft Office application.
  • The add-ins, the smart documents, or the smart tags do not run in any version of Microsoft Office.

and their resolution:

To resolve this problem for Visual Studio 2005 developers, a redistributable version of the update for Visual Studio 2005 is available.

answered on Stack Overflow Aug 15, 2012 by Jamie Dixon
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Found Extensibility.dll in

\Visual Studio Tools for Office\PIA\Common

folder. Copied it to the project folder.

I have VSTO 2010. Added the reference to my project, and the compile error went away. Same version on the error: 7.0.3300.0. VSTO is distributed freely by Microsoft for developers, to create solutions for Microsoft Office, but the license document enclosed with VSTO 2010 doesn't allow you to make copies of it except for your own use. That being said, I would pester Microsoft about the dll, as obviously you need it for your project. Obviously, they should have added a clause to the license to allow distribution of the dll by developers.

answered on Stack Overflow Jul 27, 2016 by Odysseus Ithaca • edited Jul 27, 2016 by Odysseus Ithaca

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