Outlook Add In suddenly stops loading

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pieter
  • Start date Start date
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Pieter

Hi,

I developed an Outlook Add In (VB.NET 2005, for Outlook 2003) that sometimes
suddenly stops loading. I've put everywhere in the code Exception Handlers,
but no Exception is catched.
it seems that other add ins aren't loaded afterwarths (nod32).

Does anybody know a way to find out why an outlook add could do this? and
find out after the problem what caused the problem?

Any help our hints would be really apreciated, thanks a lot in advance,

Pieter
 
Sounds like it crashed on a load. In Outlook, there is an option to reset
the add-ins. If you can't find it, repost your question to an Outlook
newsgroup.

Mike Ober.
 
That sounds like your addin is using a shared application namespace with
various other Outlook addins. In that case any fault in any of the addins
will cause all of them to stop loading. A better solution is to use a shim
or VSTO to load the addin into its own application namespace so it isn't
affected by problems with other addins and problems with your addin don't
kill all other addins.

For information on shimming Outlook addins see the .NET information at
http://www.microeye.com/resources/res_outlookvsnet.htm.

You must handle all errors in your addin, as you indicate that you are
doing, plus you must release all of your Outlook objects at the correct time
so Outlook can close properly, and for .NET you might have to also
explicitly call the garbage collector and to release all of your COM objects
and then wait for the garbage collector to finish.
 
Ken said:
That sounds like your addin is using a shared application namespace with
various other Outlook addins. In that case any fault in any of the addins
will cause all of them to stop loading. A better solution is to use a shim
or VSTO to load the addin into its own application namespace so it isn't
affected by problems with other addins and problems with your addin don't
kill all other addins.

For information on shimming Outlook addins see the .NET information at
http://www.microeye.com/resources/res_outlookvsnet.htm.

You must handle all errors in your addin, as you indicate that you are
doing, plus you must release all of your Outlook objects at the correct time
so Outlook can close properly, and for .NET you might have to also
explicitly call the garbage collector and to release all of your COM objects
and then wait for the garbage collector to finish.
Click to expand...

I had an add-in that suddenly stopped loading. This was because I had
upgraded the client machine to Windows XP Service Pack 2, which
introduces new security features. One of these is that a non-trusted
add-in won't run by default.

If you use the outlook shim solution as Ken suggested, the add-in is
given certificates and trusted. I used the guide here to set this up.
There's a lot to do, but if you follow the instructions carefully it
does work.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...en-us/dnoxpta/html/odc_comshim.asp?frame=true

Regards
Richard
http://www.richardjonas.com/blog
 
Will this work with .net 2.0? I had been using a Shim and it worked
great with .Net 1.1, but as soon as .net 2.0 came into the picture it
did not work anymore and I had to go to using regsvr32 which seems to be
causing this issue to happen for me.
Any suggestions?
Rog
 
It should.

I haven't used shimming with 2.0, I write my addins mostly using VB 6 code
when I'm going to distribute them.

I'd start a new thread with that specific question as the subject and post
it only in the dotnet groups so people more expert in that area will pay
attention to it. If it's in this thread it might get ignored.
 
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