.Net 2005 Windows App with Reference to Word 2003 DLL

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Guest

Hello: I have a C# Windows App that has a reference to the Word 2003 dll,
which from my understanding of things will boil down to the
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll PIA that lives in the GAC of the
Development Machine (e.g, my machine), since I have Office 2K3 installed on
my development machine. It is also worth noting that the version of the .Net
development environment I am using is Team Suite with Team Foundation Server.
The Team Foundation Server machine does not have Office 2K3 installed. When
a client build is done on a development machine, everything works fine. When
a TFS Build is attempted, it obviously fails because it can't find the
reference to the Word PIA DLL when being compiled on the TFS machine. So,
short of installing Word or Office 2K3 on the TFS machine, what should/can be
done on the TFS machine so that TFS Builds will be successful for my app?
 
I couldn't find anything on the Web relating to this problem, so I called
Microsoft and talked to my "Technical Evangelist Team" assigned to my
company. They told me there are 2 choices to get around this problem:
1.)Install Office 2K3 on the TFS/Build Server (in our env, this is the same
machine)
2.)Manually copy and register the Word 2K3 COM DLLs on the TFS/Build Server
until a build is successfuly achieved (e.g, everything is satisfactorily
resolved at compile time by the compiler).

#1 is clearly the quick fix to the problem, but annoyes me based on
principle. The principle is that there should be some sort of Office Runtime
to address this issue. I shouldn't have to install a full version of a
product on a build machine just so an app that uses some of it's DLLs can
successfully compile and build. It also makes me wonder if that creates
additional costs because of the need for an additional license for the build
server.
#2, is probably not something that will happen quickly because the Word 2K3
COM DLL that is being refered to, could also refer to other Word COM DLLs,
and so on and so forth....the point being is that this could take some
substantial time to figure out, which I don't have right now (have bigger
fish to fry right now).

So, in my opinion, a less than optimal resolution for what I was hoping, but
nonetheless a working resolution.
 
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