May 2006 - Posts

More VSTO Deployment - AppCheck and PIACheck compiled
03 May 06 12:46 PM | madsn | 1 comment(s)

A while ago Microsoft released a walkthrough for VSTO deployment to, as Misha puts it; "not remove the pain but help controlling it". The walkthrough covers all my (less structured) instructions, and improves on security aspects.

However the article does provide you with a fair amount of work. The security part adds strong-name based evidence for assemblies which is absolutely required from a security perspective. However, the samples does not support multi-assembly deployments so you'll need to write this up yourself. I'll look into using Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies() later on to see if that will solve this problem.

Furthermore you get native checking utils for common prereqs. These are not compiled however and Aerodrome has posted a compiled version. Although these exe's (PIACheck.exe and AppCheck.exe) works nicely if you've got the .NET Framework preinstalled, they will fail if not. Probably because they're compiled in managed C++, and not the way instructed in the MSDN article. We've made a working set available here (courtesy of compilation genious Øystein Garshol).

Finally I have to point out once more the weak design of the prerequisite package structure. The prerequisite definitions are fundamentally a part of any solution and should at least be copied into the solution or setup project filestructure when used to enable inclusion in sourcecontrol and automated builds. I would sure like to know how Microsoft approaches this problem using WiX or other tools.

And to all of you who haven't deleted my blog from your blogroll: I'm back:-)

Filed under: Office System