Something that I happened upon this week after reading one-to-many post saying that VSTO Add-ins can't be installed for all users under Office 2007.  I knew it worked that way under Office 2003, and they couldn't have broken compatability that much in '07.  I was determined to find a workable solution to this problem because the sheer administrative overhead of needing each user to run the install or another patch mechanism was rediculous.

First, I had to identify the major difference between '03 and '07 when dealing with VSTO:  '07 supports it natively.  In '03 all VSTO Add-ins are loaded via a generic shim and are essentially regular COM add-ins.  In '07 the add-ins are loaded directly by the Office app, ignoring the shim.  To get around this issue, you have to cause '07 to load your add-in the same way that '03 would:  as a COM-shimmed add-in.  Invoking this behavior is a simple stroke of the delete key.

Setup your installer as normal, except having all registry entries defined under HKLM instead of HKCU.  Then navigate to HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Office/[APP]/Addins/[YourAddin].  Remove the "Manifest" value from this key.  This value being missing causes '07 to load your add-in via the ProgID [YourAddin], which eventually leads it to the VSTO AddinLoader and your real add-in via the Manifest defined under your CLSID/[GUID] entry.

There is a downside to this method:  If your add-in crashes, it will take out all other add-in using the AddinLoader via Office's disabled list.

In last night's episode of Eureka (Duck, Duck, Goose), the winner of the fair was Megan, daughter of Julie He(a?)rrington.  It's always fun to come across little things like this in life.

For some time now I've been working on a project, QuickBuff/NB2-Lite, the former being its name, the later being its purpose.  The premise is to have a plugin that can take the old nb2 profiles we probably all have still laying around and run them.  Recently I've been making a lot of progress on this and have been able to ssuccessfully run buff profiles.  Unfortunately vital recovery is still incomplete, and I haven't yet started on equipment manipulations.

I very much wanted to bring back the old nb2, but between the network parser changes and the control infrastructure changing, that became less and less of a reality.  The network parser alone was enough to make me want to drop it since nb2 is just a huge network driven state engine.  Not to mention the sheer amount of code duplication within that engine.  I don't know how nerf ever managed to maintain this code as long as he did.

Expect to hear more on this in the future as I near the testing phase.  I'll probably also start requesting copies of your profiles so that I can make sure everything works as expected.

I know I said something about tomorrow, but once I started working out the examples I wanted, I found many defiencies in my original setup.  I've since been working out a complete overhaul of the message system.  Once I complete the refining of the new system, I'll go over everything including the differences between the two.