Snowball - The Blog

Today, I had create a deployment procedure for a VSTO 2007 Excel Add-in. Since I'm not an expert in Office-related development, I started doing some research on the topic. Here's what I found out to be the best way to do such a deployment. (Note, again, I'm a rookie at Office development, so there might be better ways...) 

Initially, I found the most easy way to deploy an add-in is using the Publish function in Visual Studio 2008. This way, a ClickOnce is created.
Now, the add-in connects to a lot of WCF services. The addresses of the endpoints of these services, among other configuration information, is stored in the app.config from the add-in. This information needs to be editable, since the server address might change over time.

When using the ClickOnce setup, the deployed application worked fine. The application was able to read out the settings of the app.config file. However, it is not stored in a specific location, since it is in the cache of ClickOnce. So, I had to find another solution, so that the config file can be located and edited.

So, after doing some more research on the subject, I found the correct way to deploy an add-in is a simple setup project created from Visual Studio. However, you need to add some registry settings as well as some other configuration.
The complete procedure is explained here and here.

One of my intentions of the new year is learning WCF. And yes, I've been doing some coding with it these last days.

I was now trying out to use a WCFService hosted in a website, so I wanted to access the svc file via http://localhost:905/Service.svc . However, IIS7 on my Vista machine returned 404.3 - Not found and the mime type not being configured correctly to be served.
I was thinking it to be something like a configuration exe that needed to be ran before it would work, similar to aspnet_regiis.exe. And indeed, it was: the following command solved my problem:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation>Service
ModelReg.exe -i

What it did, it installed the necessary scriptmaps at the IIS metabase root and folders within.