Odd behavior with Ribbon in VSTO Outlook 2013 Addin

0
votes

I have a VSTO addin for Outlook 2013. The odd thing is sometimes when I do something seemingly unconnected. My button group disappears from the place it was in. Was there working perfectly for a long time. I added a ribbon group launcher, and it vanished. I then rolled back the pending changes and it still isn't there.

First, why does my ribbon group always disappear, it is set to Position: AfterOfficeId GroupMailDelete and the tab is set to TabReadMessage. This has always worked for me up until just now. I looked up the Office Id's for elements in office 2013 in the docs and they are correct (and as I said it's been fine for months).

Second, why does it not reappear when I rollback changes? I only changed that file and when I rolled back it looked like it did before I touched it.

Also it was working right until I made the change. Tested before, worked, tested again my ribbon group is gone.

I really can't stand this problem as it messes up my entire addin. Someone please offer assistance as none of the other SO answers or anything else I've found have helped.

Thanks a ton

EDIT:

Rewrote the program copying over the logic and redoing the ribbon and forms in designer. Register the event handlers was a pain as was constructing the two forms, one from EF and one using raw sql. But aside from that it works now. Why would it work when I rewrite it, but still not work when I rollback the breaking change? Not to mention that same change didn't break the copy I rewrote.

2
c#vstooutlook-addin

2 Answers

1
votes

Did you check out the list of running COM add-ins right after the ribbon disappeared? Is your add-in listed in the list as an active one?

Microsoft Office applications can disable add-ins that behave unexpectedly. If an application does not load your add-in, the application might have hard disabled or soft disabled your add-in.

Hard disabling can occur when an add-in causes the application to close unexpectedly. It might also occur on your development computer if you stop the debugger while the Startup event handler in your add-in is executing.

Soft disabling can occur when an add-in produces an error that does not cause the application to unexpectedly close. For example, an application might soft disable an add-in if it throws an unhandled exception while the Startup event handler is executing.

When you re-enable a soft-disabled add-in, the application immediately attempts to load the add-in. If the problem that initially caused the application to soft disable the add-in has not been fixed, the application will soft disable the add-in again. Read more about that in the How to: Re-enable an Add-in That Has Been Disabled article.

Do you get any UI errors?

See How to: Show Add-in User Interface Errors for more information.

Finally, what ribbon XML do you use? Could you be more specific?

1
votes

For anyone researching this in the future, try this link - which worked perfectly for me: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms268871(v=vs.140).aspx