Thursday 21 February 2008

Deploying Office Tools SE with VS 2005 / Creating Custom Bootstrap

I'm in the process of working out how to include Office 2007 PIA/VSTO redistributable packages with my application (Office 2007 Ribbon app). Unfortunately these packages do not appear in the Pre-requisites is VS 2005.

As part of my investigations I stumbled on a nice Custom Bootstrap Manifest Generator written by David Guyer. Looks to be very useful, yet to use but worth bookmarking.

Find it here : Bootstrapper Manifest Generator

Also, I have found a nice article on how to deploy Office 2003/2007 solutions using Windows Installer. It's a 2 part walkthrough.

Of major interest is the Package.xml file for PIA (2003/2007).

I've run through this and it all works - though not exactly how I wanted it to. You have to execute the setup.exe in order to install the .Net 2.0, VSTO and PIA. In is interactive, requiring some clicks on next buttons. I really wanted it to be silent, but I guess as this only needs to be run the once then it is OK. The MSI can be executed silently thereafter to install updates so it's good enough.

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