You have probably been reading and hearing about Microsoft Office 2010 for some months. Now, you may be wondering how much work is necessary to install your existing Office 2007/VSTO 3.0 solutions on customer computers that have Office 2010. Perhaps you’re thinking about migrating the Windows Installer Setup projects or ClickOnce deploymen projects? The answer is that you don’t need to change anything. If you have Office 2007 add-ins that were created for the VSTO 3.0 runtime, the registry keys for Office 2010 add-ins created for the VSTO 2010 runtime are exactly the same. For Office 2007 document-level projects, the custom document properties are also the same in Office 2010. The same deployment project used to install Office 2007 solutions should work on Office 2010 as well.
In fact, deployment becomes even easier for two reasons: fewer prerequisites to include and fewer custom actions to run.
- Less need to deploy the VSTO runtime. The VSTO 2010 runtime with the .NET Framework 3.5 extensions is already included in Microsoft Office 2010. For more information, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsto/archive/2010/05/13/when-do-i-need-to-deploy-the-vsto-runtime.aspx.
- Less need for the inclusion list. VSTO add-ins installed to the Program Files directory are considered trusted without creating an inclusion list entry for each solution and each user. For more information, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsto/archive/2010/03/10/changes-in-the-security-model-for-office-solutions.aspx.
MSDN Library resources include the following topics:
- Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime Installation Scenarios
- Trusting Office Solutions by Using Inclusion Lists
If you have any questions, search for answers or post questions in the Visual Studio Tools for Office forum at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/threads.
Mary Lee, Programming Writer.