I have an issue where I did have my addins loading correctly in Excel, however, now when I load Excel, they no longer load. This is on the same development machine. One minute they were working, the next they were not.
I've tried creating new addins from scratch and these won't load either.
Could it be something corrupted in the registry that isn't fixed by reinstalling the setup file of an addin?
It could be, as you are rightly suspecting, a corrupt registry entry
Or, it can even be a possiblity that you have uninstalled something which is required.
Do tell us the dev eniv that you are working in.
Regards,
Pavan
I'm working in Visual Studio 2005 with VSTO 2005 SE and Office 2003. I hadn't uninstalled anything.
What I was doing when it happened was I am trying to get the Actions Pane working from an application level addin. In another post I read this is not possible unless you buy the non SE version of VSTO, but I can find no such version. I am certainly too stubborn to accept that the Actions Pane can be accessible from a document level addin and not an application level addin. At least not without some creative attempts to go around the issue.
So, I decided to write a document level addin with a method that allows passing out a reference to it's Actions Pane object. I then instantiated this addin from within the application level addin I was writing. This way, I could make a call to the Actions Pane object hosted by the document level addin as a cheap hack where I could hopefully make it visible within the active instance of Excel in my application level add-in.
It was in the running of this that all addins stopped functioning. My thought is that there may have been some kind of conflict between running each of these at the same time based upon how they update the registry. I took a look at the registry, yet there was no reference to either. I tried creating a new basic addin from scratch and it didn't register properly either.
The actions I'm taking now are to remove VSTO and Office, then reinstall both of them. I'm hoping this will wipe and repair the registry settings (I cleared the office ones after removal), at which point I'm hoping to backup the registry, try running my hack again and if it causes the same problem, revert to the backed up copy of the registry and see if regular addins start working again.
I'd appreciate input and ideas from others on: a. How to fix it and b. any method to get the actions pane working
Update:
Reinstalling Office appeared to do it. Still trying to figure out a means to access the Actions Pane. In the idea I had, the Actions Pane is not being initialized properly, thus it cannot be referenced.
Anyone else have any suggestions?
One thing that helped (well, indirectly) however, was utilizing the FusionLogging.
http://blogs.msdn.com/suzcook/archive/2003/05/29/57120.aspx
I've used this in the past to troubleshot loading/version issues, and it has helped dramatically when there are problems, and you just have no idea what is going on.
In this case, FusionLogging wasn't logging ANYTHING when I attempted to load the addin (by checking the checkbox in 'ComAddins'. This, however, was a clue that Excel wasn't even attempting to load it, and therefore wasn't some bug in my program that was causing it to bomb out; if it was, I would have at least had a Fusion log entry to look at. At this point, I believed (incorrectly) that it was a security issue, and some .net security check wasn't allowing it to load, however it was just disabled.
Thanks much! Can I send you some $$ via paypal?
And somebody should mark Ed's post above as the answer here...it is probably the same thing that happened to Dennis.
Mojo
