Outlook add-in migration to vs 2010

0
votes

We have an outlook add-in project in visual studio 2008 that uses VSTO 2005. This works with outlook 2003 and outlook 2007 so far.

Now my company is moving to visual studio 2010 so I tried to migrate to visual studio 2010 with VSTO 2005, I am having a few compilation problems. My question:

  1. Will VSTO 2005 work on vs 2010 and the project will compile and run as usual?

  2. If not, is there any workaround to support outlook 2003 for development with VS 2010, if it exists will it work on outlook 2010 also.

  3. If this is not possible, is it advisable to keep two separate projects one for outlook 2003 (in vs2008) and other for outlook 2007-2010 (in vs 2010)?

Thanks for your time

2
visual-studio-2010vstooutlook-addin

2 Answers

1
votes

I researched VSTO 2010 upgrade options for a project a couple months ago. This MSDN link lists which versions of Office can be targeted by VSTO 2010. It states: "If you need to create a solution that can also run in Microsoft Office 2003, you must use an earlier version of Visual Studio." To specifically answer your questions.

  1. No
  2. The only workaround that was mentioned anywhere was to use C++ to write your own Office addin loader. I did not find any examples of how to do this, and it did not seem like a reasonable option anyway.
  3. Maintaining two projects is an option if you really need to support office 2003. It just depends on if you are willing take on the extra work of maintaining two code bases.

Another option would be to keep using VS2008 to target Office 2003-2010. However that would prevent you from taking advantage of .NET 4 and any Office 2010 specific features.

We simply decided to no longer support Office 2003 once we moved to VS2010.

1
votes

A great part of my customers are still running Office XP / Office 2003 installations, and are only planning for an upgrade to Office 2010. I think in big corporate environments Office 2003 will stay until end of 2012. So if you want to support this share, you'll have to consider this large client base.

I'm working a lot with a third-party tool called Add-in Express. This allows to create add-ins for different office versions independently from the VSTO complications, because they use their own loader. I've targeted Office 2003 with commandbar-based UI and Office 2007/2010 with ribbon UI in the same add-in with the same codebase. May be it's worth to have a look at this tool.