VSTO Word 2010 Development

Question

I am trying to create a VSTO Word 2010/2007 add-in and have run into a few questions:

• If I use Backstage View and other 2010 features in the ribbon, how will Word 2007 deal with them? (that is, do I need to do some conditional version checking? If so, how?)
• The whole basic thing is Interop. Does it link to Word 14.0 and embed primary interpolations, do I allow deployment to Word 2007 without new primary operations?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I'll start with point 2 .:

If you want to deploy Office 2010 and 2007, you need to add links to assemblies v12.0 (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word and Office).

Now there is still a problem that your add-on will require PIA 2007, but they will not be installed if you only have Office 2010 on the target machine (because they have Office 2007 as a prerequisite). To solve this problem, you need to set Embed Interop Assemblies = true for these two dll libraries (in the reference properties).

This leads to some “weirdness” when Intellisense does not find methods, etc., but this should not be a big problem - at least now PIA is no longer required, and your add-on will be deployed both in 2007 and in 2010 (you have to take care of the installer, but this is a completely different story).

It's a bit of a mess, but if you work with VSTO, I suppose you're used to things like this :-)

About point 1 .. I assume that if you want to deploy before 2007 and 2010, you should do what I described above. This means that you need to reference 2007 builds and you will not have access to 2010-specific features.