Trying to debug Outlook 2003 addin, always getting 'cannot attach to process' error

After trying to debug an addin for Outlook 2003 with no joy I turned to google for support, this on previous attempts had not come up with any good solutions but I managed to find the following post: http://www.analogousmember.com/archives/000394.html that resolves the solution.

It appears that outlook will try to load up the 2.0 framework when debugging thus would not allow .NET 2003 to debug it. The solution is to create an Outlook.exe.config and force it to use a 1.0 or 1.1 framework and then everything is fine, now I can get on with the job in hand.

<configuration>
   <startup>
      <supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322"/>
      <supportedRuntime version="v1.0.3705"/>
   </startup>
</configuration>

2 Comments

  • I found that I had the same problem. I tried your solution, but all that does is cause Outlook to disable the Add-In. For right now, I've removed .NET 2.0 framework in my development enviroment, since I don't need it right now and it works fine.

    Does anyone have a true solution to this problem?

  • After 1 year and a half I had to smile when I fount my own post searching to solve the same problem.

    The problem was, that even with the help of this post I couldn't solve my problem this time.

    But after all, I realized, that if Visual Studio 2005 and 2003 is installed on the same machine, trying to debug an add-in would crash Outlook even with the above mentioned method.

    I certainly cannot be sure, that this was the problem, but when I installed a fresh system (on a virtual machine of course) with Outlook and Visual Studio 2003, everything worked like described above.

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