Use VSTO Customisation Without Installing

1
votes

I have a VSTO document-level customisation which was originally built with VS2005, VSTO 2005 SE and Excel 2003. In that configuration, I published the customisation from VS2005, copied it to where I wanted it on a user's PC, and ran a tool I have developed which set the CAS policy correctly and used the ServerDocument class to add the customisation to the user's workbook. The user could then restart Excel, open the workbook and the customisation would run. We could just copy a new version of the customisation to the same location and it would be used next time the user opened the workbook.

I've now upgraded to (gasp!) VS2008, VSTO 3.0 and Excel 2007. I've reworked my custom policy tool so that it works with the new version of VSTO. I can still attach the customisation to the workbook, but on first opening the workbook it seems to "install" the customisation into the user's AppData\Local\Apps folder. This then causes considerable grief when we want to update the customisation later. This also changes the value of AppDomain.CurrentDomain\BaseDirectory.

Is there a way in VSTO 3.0 to go back to how we used to work, without installing the customisation to the Apps folder?

1
vsto

1 Answers

2
votes

As I understand it, Microsoft shifted VSTO in VS2008 to use ClickOnce for deployment and Authenticode for Code Access Security (CAS).

However, you can avoid ClickOnce by appending |vstolocal flag to the _AssemblyLocation custom property value of your customized workbook file. This |vstolocal instructs "VSTO to run the solution from the installation folder" according to this VSTO Team blog post on deploying VSTO add-ins to everyone on a machine

The VSTO loader's change from CAS policy to Authenticode may also effect how you sign your assemblies.