A few technical questions before purchasing...

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A few technical questions before purchasing...
 
Matt Gabor




Posts: 2
 Joined: 2009-07-23
Hi,

Your product looks great and I'm considering purchasing it. However, I have a few questions before I go ahead and buy.

Before I ask the questions, I will give you a little bit of context. I will be building an add-in for Internet Explorer that will be deployed on client machines that I don't control. This means that I cannot guarantee whether or not the .NET framework will be installed or, if it is installed, I cannot guarantee what version of the framework will be installed. So, here are the questions:

1: If the client machine has no .NET framework installed, will the add-in installer download and install the appropriate .NET framework?

2: Does Add-in Express resolve the Common Language Runtime (CLR) version problem for managed BHO's? In doing research I understand that only one version of the CLR can be loaded at a time. This means that managed BHOs that depend on different versions of the CLR will conflict with each other and could cause problems. See these links:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ieextensiondevelopment/thread/5a3f950a-38cf-4e72-9246-f54278d06962/

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ieextensiondevelopment/thread/f96f2c90-8f86-423f-b9ce-aea5f5b06f77/

Thanks, in advance, for answering my questions,

Matt
Posted 23 Jul, 2009 11:46:44 Top
Andrei Smolin


Add-in Express team


Posts: 18806
 Joined: 2006-05-11
Hi Matt,

On those pages, I found the following:

That means if a CLR 1.1 BHO is loaded, all CLR 2.0 BHOs will fail to load


Yes, this is true. But Add-in Express for Internet Explorer doesn't support 1.1. And, because Frameworks 3.0 and 3.5 are just extensions of 2.0 (in other words, they are not independent Framworks), you can safely run IE add-ons based on 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 in the same IE process.

1: If the client machine has no .NET framework installed, will the add-in installer download and install the appropriate .NET framework?


You can implement this in the setup project of your IE add-on solution. Note however that installing the .NET Framework requires the administrator privileges. This is partially compensated by the fact that the only IE extension type that doesn't require the admin permissions is IE bar.


Andrei Smolin
Add-in Express Team Leader
Posted 23 Jul, 2009 14:10:33 Top
Matt Gabor




Posts: 2
 Joined: 2009-07-23
Hi Andrei,

Thanks for your speedy reply. The information was very helpful. Regarding your point about Admin permissions, do you have a recommended approach for dealing with that issue (especially on Vista)? Could the IE extension and .NET framework only be installed for the specific user instead of all users? Would this mean that the user doesn't need admin privileges?

Thanks,

Matt
Posted 24 Jul, 2009 17:41:11 Top
Andrei Smolin


Add-in Express team


Posts: 18806
 Joined: 2006-05-11
Hi Matt,

First off, I'm terribly sorry for misguiding you: a standard user can install an IE bar only (I've modified my previous post to eliminate this mistake).

Could the IE extension and .NET framework only be installed for the specific user instead of all users?


You can't install .NET Framework on the per-user basis. And as I pointed above, a specific user that doesn't have administrator permissions can install IE bar only. To install an IE toolbar, the user must have admin rights and the toolbar will be installed for all users. The same applies to a BHO.


Andrei Smolin
Add-in Express Team Leader
Posted 25 Jul, 2009 08:43:31 Top