Posts Tagged ‘Deployment’

Office from Microsoft Store: a spreading source of issues

The number of users having the Office version installed from Microsoft Store increases every day as computer vendors install it by default; see e.g. this support article from Dell. Per-user add-ins and some per-machine add-ins may run into a severe issue with that Office version. The issue is: the add-in uses old versions... Read the rest of this entry →

Updating Office COM add-ins automatically

To test the example described below, download and run the application installing the sample COM add-in. When the add-in is installed, you start Excel 2000 - 2016 and find the add-in in the UI. Leave Excel open and in a couple of minutes, you'll get a notification suggesting installing an update... Read the rest of this entry →

How to customize MSI installer using Add-in Express ClickTwice custom actions

Let's start with the conclusion: you can deeply customize the UI and behavior of the MSI installer of your Add-in Express based Office extension using a ClickTwice custom action. To see how this works, build the project below, install the add-in by starting the MSI installer, and have a closer look at that installer's UI... Read the rest of this entry →

Localization of Office add-ins using forms-based resources

The article describes how to create a localized version of an Office add-in by using regular forms-based resources without having to apply them manually to each component, form or control... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express sim-ships with Visual Studio 2017 RC

Last month Microsoft published Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2017. We, as Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner, were invited to support this version at the RC stage, and we were happy to seize the opportunity... Read the rest of this entry →

Introducing automatic updates for Office extensions

Version 8.3 of Add-in Express for Office and .net added support for automatic updates when using ClickTwice – MSI-based web deployment technology, this technology is closely tied with Add-in Express... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express sim-ships with Visual Studio 2015 and Office 2016 Preview

I am happy to report good news to all Add-in Express users – we are one of the Microsoft partners to sim-ship our products together with the Visual Studio 2015 RC and Office 2016 Preview... Read the rest of this entry →

How to implement auto-update for Office add-ins

Automatic updates for software applications' mobile apps have become an everyday occurrence for most users. For a user it provides a level of comfort to know that their software is always up to date with the latest and greatest version. It could also be a source of irritation for many users depending on the frequency of updates – not many users would be happy upgrading to a new version every day... Read the rest of this entry →

Video: Create WiX setup projects using familiar Visual Studio designers

Visual Studio 2013 is a wonderful code editor. I'm a fan of it (monochrome icons and all). However, I have not adopted as quickly as I thought due to the lack of support for setup projects. This was big whole, thus many of us, developers, have turned to WiX... Read the rest of this entry →

Creating a standard setup project using WiX Designer

Today, I'll walk you through how to use the Designer for Visual Studio WiX Setup Projects to create a standard install package for desktop application. Along the way, we'll utilize the user interface editor to add a custom screen to the installer... Read the rest of this entry →

How to add custom dialogs in WiX installers

The WiX toolset provides a number of built-in dialogs that should be adequate for most installers. If, however, you need more flexibility when it comes to your MSI installer's user interface, WiX provides the ability to build a custom UI of your setup project... Read the rest of this entry →

How to implement a WiX installer upgrade

So by now, I hope we all know and have come to accept the fact that Visual Studio setup projects are a thing of the past and that we've all become comfortable with using the WiX toolset to build our Windows Installers... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express for Internet Explorer, version 9 Beta is published

This blog is about the steps required to switch to using .NET 3.5 or any other .NET Framework in your .NET 2.0 IE add-on... Read the rest of this entry →

Loading a .NET 2.0 Office add-in on a machine with .NET 4.0

The fact is: almost all Office add-ins will load correctly in this situation. Yes, you don't need to modify anything in the add-in unless your add-in is affected by the issues described in .NET Framework 4 Migration Issues... Read the rest of this entry →

Introducing Designer for Visual Studio WiX Setup Projects

I'm sure by now you are all aware that Microsoft removed all Visual Studio Installer project types with the release of Visual Studio 2012. A suggested alternative to creating setup files was to use the very powerful and flexible WiX toolset. The one big problem, with switching over to WiX for your setup project was that, a lot of people already invested a considerable amount of time building a setup using the Visual Studio Installer project ... Read the rest of this entry →

VDProj to WiX Converter is released!

Only one month has passed since we published the first beta and here I am announcing the release of our new product - VDProj to WiX Converter. If you have at least a couple of Visual Studio setup projects that you need to support and develop further, this tool is definitely worth trying ... Read the rest of this entry →

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